


Descent

by Teyke



Category: Marvel 616, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, F/M, Happy Halloween!, High Fantasy, M/M, Marvel Universe Big Bang 2014, Slender Man - Freeform, lords and ladies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-31
Updated: 2014-10-31
Packaged: 2018-02-23 07:40:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 67,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2539784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Teyke/pseuds/Teyke
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A hundred years ago humanity fled to the skies to escape the Darkness spreading across the land. Now the Flying Cities are mysteriously sinking, imperilling every man, woman, and child who lives there. Together with the transmution mages Henry Pym and Lady Janet Van Dyne, and joined by the amnesiac immortal Dr. Donald Blake, High Wizard Anthony Stark mounts an expedition down into the Dark, determined to uncover the secrets of the magical calamity that wiped humanity from the face of the Earth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Sunlit Sky

**Author's Note:**

> I owe many, many thanks to Alexis, my brilliant beta, without whom this work would have been considerably lesser. Thank you so much. 
> 
> V, as always... yeah, I totally owe you waffles. 
> 
> My enthusiastic and honoured thanks also go to Truthismusic, for picking this story to do art for - and, my, what a lot of awesome art! I start beaming every time I think about it, so, you should also please go enjoy her art and tell her it's great, [here!](http://truthismusic.livejournal.com/21774.html) Thank you so much ♥

“My lord, your guests have arrived.”

“Just a moment, I – _blast!”_

The crystal vibrated one long ominous moment more and then did just that, sending broken fragments flying. Lord Anthony Stark, High Wizard of the Seven Cities, brushed shards out of his hair and ruefully accepted the faded towel that his butler, one Mr. Edwin Jarvis, proffered without comment. The terry cloth quickly gained numerous red spots as Lord Stark dabbed at the little cuts he now sported across his face, and he sighed as he shoved the protective goggles he’d been wearing up over his head.

“Your coat, my lord,” Jarvis fussed about him, ushering him out of the heavy protective leathers he was wearing and into a coat with enough filigree to outshine the sun.

“It’s just Van Dyne and Pym,” Lord Stark protested, quickly hushed as Jarvis set about dabbing his cuts with salve.

“Indeed,” the elderly butler returned, not without a degree of censorship. It was enough to force his Lordship to meekly hold still, the point made: Anthony Stark was not fit to appear before company. The unfortunate terry cloth was not merely stained with blood from the latest mishap, but the accumulated dirt and oils of two days spent in the laboratory without washing; and on top of this, his Lordship was unshaven, possessing a dark shadow about his lower face. In short, he was an entirely unappealing host – but what were friends for, if not to inflict oneself upon them? 

That, however, cut both ways. Ten minutes later, Jarvis admitted Lord Stark into the parlour where he’d stashed the pair. Lady Van Dyne was a vision of elegance and grace, her magically woven dress – all her own work and design – shimmering ever-so-subtly, just enough to be reminiscent of fairy lights. Magistar Pym, on the other hand, was whispering to growing crowd of ants perched on the rim of a plant pot.

The appearance of Lord Stark – or, more accurately, his formidable butler – was enough to break the Magistar’s concentration, and induce him to quickly ( _very_ quickly) explain, “Ah, I’m trying to convince them to move.”

“In, or out?” Lord Stark’s voice was as dry as the legendary deserts of old. A casual observer, if not already induced to a swoon by the crowd of gathered insects, might have thought the question unduly sarcastic; one more familiar with the history of Lord Stark and Mgr. Pym, however, would realize that the question was not unfair, as the pair had alternatively and sometimes co-conspiratorially terrorized the University back as students – a practice that they had continued even after each had earned their first Masteries. Such pranks had turned more vicious during the disconsolate years in which Mgr. Pym had been sighing over then-Mga. Van Dyne from afar; rather unfortunately for their friendship, Mgr. Stark had not been above monopolizing Mga. Van Dyne’s dance card at some of Society’s most interesting balls – events that one so lowly-born as Mgr. Pym could never hope to attend. Speculation about the joining of two great Houses had spread across the whole of New York, and to the other Flying Cities, besides; it was usually spoken of in shocked tones, that then-Lady Van Dyne would permit her daughter to be courted by such a rake. That neither of the young heirs had a desire to marry the other was not, unfortunately, generally understood.   

But that had been years ago. Hopes had been surpassed; Society had been thrilled with a scandalous courtship of an entirely different sort; friendships had been restored, and Mgr. Stark had toasted the both of them at their wedding with all the best will. Now, Mgr. Pym rolled his eyes at his old friend. Then, quickly attending to the more important matter, he returned his attention to Jarvis and explained, “There have been problems with them coming in on bananas – several of the cloudchasers managed to get packed full of them.”

“I shall look into it with the grocer,” Jarvis said pleasantly. All other parties winced, although His Lordship and Her Ladyship hid it well. The grocer was no doubt in for a trying afternoon – morning? Lord Stark privately realized he wasn’t quite sure, and checked his coat. It _seemed_ like an afternoon coat. And – aha. Jarvis had materialized a tea service from somewhere, ergo, it _must_ be past noon. Had it been earlier or later, there would have been coffee – in Lord Stark’s opinion, an infinitely preferable option, but in Jarvis’ well-known opinion tea time was for _tea_ , and although coffee might be an acceptable substitute at other times, this hour was sacrosanct. 

“It’s so good to see you again, Lord Wizard,” Lady Van Dyne said, folding her hands daintily over her visiting dress. Lord Stark’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. Lady Van Dyne, after all, was formally Lady _Magistra_ Van Dyne, and (as Society was fond of noting) not really a _proper_ lady in some ways. Certainly, she was not sweet unless she had something up her sleeve; and as her Mastery was in Transmutation, oftentimes that might be something larger than might be allowed even by such voluminous apparel as she currently wore. “After receiving no response to my calls for so long, I’d half-begun to believe the rumours that you’d taken deathly ill.” Her tone sweetened into pure spun sugar; her eyes dropped down over Lord Stark’s appearance, subtly enough that Mgr. Pym – still engrossed with his ants, and now acting with considerably more hurry –took no note of it. Lord Stark, on the other hand, did not fail to miss the open mocking. “Though it seems the rumour does have some merit.”

“Lady Magistra Van Dyne,” Lord Stark crossed over to offer the usual courtesies. It was often said among Society (and repeated by the more knowledgeable of the Commons) that Lord Stark was a man of unusual talent, and in this moment he proved it entirely true, managing to set aside his unwashed, unshaven state by sheer force of will – and life-long training. “As always, you are a vision of elegance.” The compliment was delivered with a charming lack of art. Although all of Society knew that Lady Van Dyne’s (well earned, if scandalously so) vanity was her work, it a rare observer who had enough magical training to appreciate it in full.

But even Lord Stark’s skill could not maintain the illusion of wellness for more than a moment in the face of so much evidence. The hollows beneath his eyes spoke for themselves, as did the multitude of new lines crossing his face, aging him by a decade. Within the next minute, Lord Stark found himself somehow sitting, holding a cup of tea, with a plate in front of him piled high with scones – jam pre-spread, as though he were a child.

Jarvis, approving, retreated quietly through a side door while Lord Stark looked around in some mild confusion, uncertain how this situation had developed. After a minute, he recovered himself enough to return to the courtesies. “Mgr. Pym, thank you for coming as well.”

“You might as well admit that this invitation was sent the wrong way ‘round, Anthony. It’s not as if I don’t know that Jan has spent the past two months pestering Jarvis for some sign that you’re alive. The University Council’s been concerned, too.”

“Why, Lord Xavier remarked on it to me last week, at the ball he threw in honour of Miss Grey – excuse me, _Magistra_ Grey,” said Lady Van Dyne, sweetly ignoring any mention of her own deep concern.

Lord Stark nearly snorted crumbs all over himself; the coat was only saved by luck and grace. Magistration, the University’s formal recognition of a student’s first Mastery of one of the seven schools of magic, only occurred on the equinoxes – and by force of custom as old as the Flying Cities themselves, the High Wizard _must_ be present. For the first time in a hundred years, he had not been... and Lord Xavier was far from the only Magistrar who might take offense at the slight to a prized apprentice. Yet his absence this last week from the Spring Equinox was not without defence. The same magical influences that made the equinox such a good time to hold the ritual of investiture had other applications, too, and he’d had need of them: if he’d waited until the summer solstice, those brand new Magistrars might not have much time to enjoy their hard-won titles.

The reminder made the rest of the scone taste like ash upon his tongue; he set the plate down and forced himself to swallow, then drained his tea, ignoring in a practiced manner the way it burned his throat. “Thank you for coming,” he said to both his guests, entirely serious this time: the time afforded to greetings and frivolities had passed. “I need your help.”

It was a blunt request: terribly impolite, and terribly revealing. Both of his guests blinked at him in dismay.

“I’m sorry, I must have misheard,” said Mgr. Pym.

“ _Hank_ ,” said Lady Van Dyne reproachfully, and then, businesslike, “As High Wizard or as Lord Stark?” And, gentler: “Or as an old friend?”

The sincerity of her offer was breathtaking – but Stark lords were made of iron. A brittle, easily shattered metal, the present Lord Stark reflected ruefully; not really good for anything except rusting spells until forged into an alloy. He smiled self-depreciatingly and stood, shucking his coat, for where they were going now was no place for gold filigree. That much untuned gold would draw Light like water running downhill, and the measurements he was taking in the lower laboratory were both delicate and critical. “It’s easier if I show you.”

The stairwells he led them down were cramped and narrow, though spotlessly clean: a good many members of the unlearned public, and many more trained minds from the University as well, had mistaken Jarvis for possessing a Mastery of Transmutation himself – though so far as Lord Stark knew, his butler and manservant had never studied magic to such a formal degree. Still, by the time they reached the bottom Lady Van Dyne’s elaborate visiting grown had transformed itself into equally fine but eminently practical clothing: trousers, blouse, and boots, all as sturdy as a mage could wish, and adorned with embroidery so fine that the eye could not pick out individual stitches.

“Light and Day,” Mgr. Pym grumbled as they reached the last landing. Lord Stark shoved open the heavy iron door there, and they emerged into the cavernous lower laboratory. It was brightly lit enough to make eyes accustomed to the dimness of the stairwell water. From the centre of the room, inch-thick gold wire spiraled out to cover the entire ceiling in a network of pure gold, all glowing with Light that was caught and refracted by diamond arrays, drawing the eye and granting not only bright illumination, akin to that of full sunlight on a summer’s day – but filled with more besides: the peace of a majestic dawn, the bliss of a love returned, the glory of sunset after a storm. Bathed in the joyous Illumination, other, mundane magicks seemed all the stronger – and there were a great many of those magicks present. All around the room, a multitude of other experiments were in progress – measuring and weighing hundreds of different variables in a thousand different ways. Both Mgr. Pym and Lady Mga. Van Dyne observed them with some covert fascination; if their fellow mage had been a recluse for the last three months, then here was proof that he had not been – horror of horrors to a mage! – unproductive. 

Mgr. Pym had relaxed beneath the Light, and now as he continued his complaint was a good deal more jovial than it might have been. “I thought we were going to fall out the bottom of the city. How far down are we?”

“At the bottom of the city,” Lord Stark replied drolly, and clapped twice. The floor rumbled as the spells embedded there caught the gesture. Though Lord Stark had not (yet) pursued a Mastery in Transmutation, like his guests his innate abilities at magic were hardly limited to one school; and the old Lord Stark, Howard II, had been determined to see his son educated to exacting competence in all of them. In the centre of the lab, a circle of stone about fifteen feet wide rippled like water, and then poured itself up the sides, collecting to form a squat wall around the hole it left behind.

The three mages strode forward, Lord Stark offhandedly snagging one of the smaller Light-filled diamonds as he passed a desk. Mgr. Pym’s and Lady Van Dyne’s steps immediately shortened, however, as soon as they were near enough to see over the low wall; it was not without a certain amount of distaste that either put their gloved hands upon it to look over properly. Lord Stark, on the other hand, stuck his head quite over with all the propriety of an ill-raised child.

“You know, there is some truth in that old saying about staring too long into the Dark,” Lady Van Dyne ventured after a moment, the lightness of her tone strained as she looked down through the hole to the nothing below.

The glaring blackness stared back at her – _looking_ up at her, she almost felt, and she could not restrain a shudder.

“Didn’t you know?” If Lady Van Dyne had aimed for lighthearted and missed, then Lord Stark shot past the target of ‘uncaring’ by an even larger margin. “Scions of House Stark are granted an exemption to that rule – we’re all born mad.” He flipped open his pocket-watch with his left hand; in his right, he held out the diamond, and in the same moment he both started the timer upon the watch and let the diamond fall.

Into the Dark.

Although schoolteachers might attempt to teach otherwise, as far as common citizens of the modern era were concerned, the idea that the surface of the Earth could reflect the sun was preposterous. That anything a whole two miles down – such a fast distance! – might still be visible was an impossibility, never-mind that any halfway observant person who might find themselves aboard a cloudchaser would note that they could observe any of the Flying Cities from far greater distances in fair weather. In truth, however, it was not a lack of history that contributed to the general ignorance of the masses, much though the University liked to pretend it was so. (Divination students studying for their Masteries, in particular, were prone to lament with a great many speeches and very few solutions the almost entirely oral nature of all histories from before the Rising.) No, the reason for the continuing confusion was the same as the reason why the wall about the city of New York wall was thirty feet high, although five would have been more than sufficient for safety’s sake: no one wanted to look over the edge. The very thought of contemplating the Darkness below for even the short amount of time it would take to discern the obvious, unnatural effects upon visibility...

Mgr. Pym was staring at the ceiling, a refuge from the sight below – and a concern of its own. “Anthony... are you experimenting on the Dweomer? That is beyond dangerous.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Lord Stark shrugged, keeping his gaze on the swiftly dwindling pinprick of Light from the diamond. Lady Van Dyne shuddered delicately and took a step back. “The Dweomer is still secure under spell and craft – upstairs.”

“Then what is this laboratory for, my lord?” Lady Van Dyne asked, her eyebrows rising sharply. Like her husband, her obvious suspicion had been that the High Wizard required aid with the Dweomer – the most powerful magic ever woven by humankind, forged by Lord Anthony Stark’s own great-grandfather, Howard I. The Dweomer was literally the lynch pin of the Flying Cities: it held them fast to the sky, in defiance of all standard magical theory, lifting humanity free from the poisonous miasma that had poured forth from the broken streets of Old York a century ago.

No one could long survive in the Dark – or so it had been thought, until Mr. Anthony Stark, not then head of House Stark, had submitted to the University the research that would earn him his Mastery in Abjuration and the title of Magistar. But even the Darkwards he’d invented were fantastically difficult to learn and cast. Few wished to invest the time and energy to learn them: there was nothing down in the Dark that anyone wanted to see – anyone except, perhaps, Lord Anthony Stark himself.

Now, he flipped his pocket-watch closed; the diamond had vanished from sight, swallowed up by the hungry Dark. He grimaced at the pocket-watch. “This is a very rough estimate, you understand, but I do like to check with my own eyes, at times. Just to be certain.”

“Certain of _what_?” asked Lady Van Dyne, sharply suspicious, just as her husband inquired, “Certain of driving yourself mad?”

“Certain that madness, to whatever degree it might apply, is not affecting my spellwork. I yet retain hope it may be... determining the _numerical_ realities to any real accuracy does require a properly spelled apparatus, however – like this one, come, look.” Lord Stark hurried over to one of the many configurations of crystals about the room, indicating the movement of the primary diodes with a displeased but unsurprised eye. A lesser mind might have required a slate and good deal of chalk to determine the result from the byzantine configurations, but as none of the three  mages in the room qualified as such, all three had worked it out before more than five seconds had ticked passed on the timing display.

“Two thousand, six hundred eleven yards,” Mgr. Pym interpreted, “with a standard deviation of thirty-four feet, measured over... one hundred square miles? Light.”

“An altimeter,” deduced Lady Mga. Van Dyne. She shared a significant look with first her husband, and then both of them turned to stare at the hole in the floor before looking back to fix the High Wizard with pale stares.

“Exactly.” Lord Stark returned their stares with a tight smile. “Steady for the moment, thankfully, though it won’t hold. On average, we’ve been losing a good ten yards a day.”

“You don’t mean to say...” Mgr. Pym choked himself off.

“I do.” Lord Stark’s gaze turned back to the hole in the floor, and most unwillingly, the other two mages found themselves staring in that direction as well. “The Flying Cities are sinking. We’ve dropped over half a mile since Midwinter.” His voice was very small in the vast reaches of the laboratory. “And I don’t know why.”

 

 

The mages retired to the parlour upstairs to be fortified by coffee, dosed liberally with brandy. Mgr. Pym and Lord Stark had both regained their colour – and then some – by the time they’d reached the top of the long upward stair; Lady Van Dyne instead elected to use her much-lauded ability to shrink down to somewhat less than three inches tall, grow wings, and fly the way up. At the top, she grew again to full size – the much larger proportional strength of her smaller form was necessary to support flight; at full size, her wings were nothing more than exceptionally pretty decorations – and by the time the men had arrived, both quite out of breath, she was well through her second well-doctored coffee and had regained her colour as well.

When Jarvis had withdrawn they sipped coffee for some time in silence, each deep in heavy thought. The proportions of brandy to coffee in each cup increased; more coffee was brought and drunk. Finally, Lady Van Dyne stirred herself to say, “The Dweomer is failing, then.”

Lord Stark shook his head, a sharp, almost violent motion. “I may not yet know the reason why, but I have managed to confirm a great many reasons why _not_. The Dweomer is perfectly fine.”

“The Dweomer is the least understood magic in the world.”

“The most closely-guarded,” Lord Stark corrected, not without an unpleasant air of superiority. It was a true statement, however: since the Rising, House Stark had guarded the Dweomer’s secret jealously. Howard I had told only his eldest daughter, Natasha Stark, who in turn had entrusted the secret to her son, and he to his son, a line unbroken. Since Howard II’s passing years ago, Lord Anthony Stark had been the only living soul to hold the ability to bypass the powerful protective wards upon the Dweomer, and the knowledge of how it worked: a situation that had made certain knowledgeable parties within the University most nervous. “The Dweomer itself is quite simple.”

“Yes, of course,” said Mgr. Pym. “It is by sheer incompetence that all other mages cannot spell flight into a cloudchaser weighing more than a few hundred tonnes.”

“It is not the Dweomer that lifts the Cities.”

Mgr. Pym and Lady Van Dyne set their coffee cups down sharply, a unified gesture of protest. Lady Van Dyne’s cup chipped; Mgr. Pym conjured a spell to mend it without needing to glance in her direction.

“The Dweomer powers those spells, nothing more. It produces no other effect. The Flying Cities are lifted by simple levitation spells, of the exact sort taught to second year students at the University – although their placement is rather more involved, you understand, being spread out as they are over so many square miles.”

It was fortunate that Mgr. Pym had already set his cup down; from the expression on his face, had he been taking a sip at that moment, the carpet before him would now have been covered in sprayed coffee. “You can’t lift billions of tonnes of rock into the air with levitation spells!” he protested. “That’s impossible! The power required – ” his open mouth worked soundlessly for a suitable description; none arrived.

“The Dweomer is a _very_ good power source. But that is all it is: just a source. It has no use all by itself. It could be used to power any spell imaginable – although diverting it from the levitation spells would, of course, have grievous effects.”

“Levitation spells?” Lady Van Dyne asked. “Not flight spells?”

“Flight spells would be even more absurd,” her husband protested. “That would cube the power requirement!”

“Levitation spells require an anchor,” she volleyed back. “And unless Lord Stark here has invented time-travel as well, then up until a few years ago there was no possible way to protect such an anchor placed upon the surface of the Earth. The Dark _eats_ all other magic.”

“A Paladin could have done it,” said Lord Stark.

“A magical Paladin! You are giving weight to childhood games and fantasies.” And rather more adult fantasies aside; tall tales of the hedonism of the surface world had been the interest of nearly every young person of their generation, but such wild fancies were for play, and there could not have been a more inappropriate time for Lord Stark to allude to such.  

“The peculiar powers of the Paladins are documented fact.” His words were sharp; for the first time, now, he exhibited some impatience with his guests’ incredulity. There was no sign that he was not dead earnest in his suggestion. “They were perhaps not mages, but their legendary abilities were quite real, including their skill at wards, and Howard I specifically noted that they were never affected by the Dark. Perhaps their skill at wards extended to crafting one that could protect the anchor for a century. Or perhaps Howard was even more brilliant than history claims; sadly, he did not specify which or how. But he _did_ document the existence of the anchor that supports New York, some two miles below us.”

 

“And the other cities?”

“New York supports them; their anchors are located here.”

“But they were lifted later,” theorized Mgr. Pym, picking up on his wife’s thinking. “Why, New Palestine is only eighty-seven years old. Could it have overstressed the main anchor?”

“Having not yet directly examined the anchor, I cannot be certain. But Howard’s notes provide for up to ten times as much weight as is currently used, presuming enough power could be provided for so many levitation spells – and presuming that we could lift so much weight up to an acceptable height in the first place. A mere seven cities should not be taxing it so, and indeed, the levitation spells show no other sign of being so taxed. Every other test I put them to indicates that they are yet underutilized – indicates, in fact, that the distance between New York and the anchor has not budged a foot; it is exactly where it was decades ago.”

“You are speaking in contradictions,” said Lady Van Dyne. “Did you not say before that we have sunk more than half a mile since Midwinter? Yet you claim as well that the distance between the anchor and New York is unchanged.”

“You are correct; and all my exertions have borne evidence that this is true. You see what has so occupied me for these past months! But the altimeter, at least, is verifiable by dropping a diamond down – or a warded rope, for better accuracy. No, you are correct in your thinking: either there is something fundamentally wrong with the anchor, so that now the spells meant to test it return false results, or the anchor has been moved.”

There was silence, during which Lord Stark reached out and added another splash of brandy to his coffee (which was, in truth, more brandy than coffee, and had been for some time). Both his guests watched him, and then wordlessly put forward their own cups for the same treatment.

“The Last Paladin died a century ago, and your illustrious ancestor not long after,” Mgr. Pym said finally. “If you do not know how the first anchor is, was, protected... would the Dweomer be able to support your Darkwards upon a new anchor? Those wards do require a fiendish amount of power themselves, and I cannot imagine that the anchor would be anything but immense.”

“It would require dropping one of the Cities,” Lord Stark admitted. “Nor can I say for certain that the Darkwards _would_ last years, or even months; I have not tested them beyond a few days, and I do not trust their long-term resilience.”

“Light above,” exclaimed Lady Van Dyne in alarm. “You’ve spent full days down there? You _are_ mad!”

“And madder still.” Lord Stark placed his brandy to one side and leaned forward. “Do not think me entirely unwise; I have long since spoken privately to Mga. Danvers about the creation of a new anchor, and she has begun construction.” Levitation spells, like most flight spells, fell under the aegis of the school of Evocation, which was the fiercely-defended domain of Mga. Danvers; a curious classification on the surface of it, but which mages thought eminently sensible, as the principle behind both was simply to vent magical power in the opposite direction to that which one wished to travel. “But it will be several more months before it can be completed, and then its long-term stability is, of course, unknown. The experiments that I can run from my laboratory have been exhausted; the truth of the matter cannot be laid bare unless I go down and find the anchor, and so far my day trips have discovered no sign of it. I believe it must be underground.”

“You must have a better idea of its location than that.”

Lord Stark shook his head. “The surface of old York has been much changed by the years and the Dark, I’m afraid. The histories are all useless – I can find nothing that matches any description within them. But at least this trip will provide a good beginning in testing the long-term resilience of the Darkwards, for I cannot imagine that it shall take less than a month to complete even a cursory search of old York.”

“A month!”

His face was utterly still. “I had intended to go alone – but I was persuaded that this might not be the wisest course of action. And so although perhaps it makes me a terrible friend, I would like to ask that you accompany me, if it is not such an outrageous request that you will strike it down immediately.”

Mgr. Pym and Lady Van Dyne looked down at their elegant coffee cups. There was but one man in the world who could have convinced Lord Anthony Stark to consider his own safety, or that his magic alone – almost impossibly impressive though it was, as was the case with all Stark scions – might be insufficient for such an overwhelming task. Edwin Jarvis had been a child in Lady Natasha Stark’s household seventy years ago, and had been responsible for raising her grandson many years later after the lady passed away, as neither the boy’s mother nor father were much given to parenting. And if Jarvis possessed no magical ability as the University would define it, then there was still much to be said about the powers of love and affection.

There was also much to be said about the necessity of success for a mission upon which the lives of every man, woman, and child in the Flying Cities might hang; Lord Stark proceeded to explain his particular choice in a voice of cold analysis: “Of necessity, we must leave soon – indeed, I fear I have delayed this expedition too long already, vainly pursuing other hopes... there is no time to teach the Darkwards to one who does not know them.”

At this, Mgr. Pym flushed. During that unfortunate time when Mgr. Pym and Mgr. Stark had been rivals of perhaps a more heated nature than was best for their friendship, Mgr. Pym had obsessively studied the other man’s spells – and was aided in doing so by a somewhat annoyed Lady Van Dyne. But he hadn’t been aware then that the High Wizard had noticed; in his mind, the other man – set apart by birth, rank, and wealth – had his nose too high in the air to notice what other magistrars might be doing. Lady Van Dyne had known better – indeed, she had occasionally witnessed a jealous rant from Lord Stark about the prodigious Henry Pym’s latest research breakthrough. Now, she took her husband’s hand and squeezed it lightly.

She also did not miss the slight pain that creased Lord Stark’s expression at witnessing this gesture. Not, she thought, for her – nor for Mgr. Pym, either, for that matter. She dropped her gaze to their clasped hands. No one bothered making many remarks about Lord Stark’s dalliances these days; even Society considered him too easy a target. The follies of his younger years had forever established him as a hedonist as terrible as one of the ancient pagans before the Rising, back when humanity had worshipped gods – easily humanized figures, and so often given human vices that vices themselves were made holy. Unlike those ancient pagans, however, Lord Stark had not fallen into catastrophe before learning some measure of discretion. And yet... Lady Van Dyne found herself wondering when she had last heard of Lord Stark being seen arm-in-arm with some _outré,_ daring darling – or even with a demure, Socially-accepted younger son or daughter – and realized that it might have been years.

 _Was_ it merely discretion? She filed away the thought in the back of her mind for later examination. This was not the time... but it nagged at her, even so. In the Dark, all loneliness was... amplified. This, she knew first-hand – and although she had not experienced it for more than a single hour nearly a decade ago, she yet had to suppress a shudder at the memory.

Lord Stark, unaware of Lady Van Dyne’s brief contemplation of his _attributes_ , continued after a beat. “You both already know the spells. Few others do. Of those remaining candidates, you are by far the best choice – for I fear that none of the others will be able to maintain the Darkwards for the months required. But with your ingenious shrinking spells...” 

“We couldn’t shrink you down, though,” Mgr. Pym put in quickly, before the thought could be aired aloud.

Lord Stark looked slightly disappointed, but waved it off. “I will be well enough.” It was true, Stark mages had always demonstrated a great deal more than their fair share of personal magical power. In light of certain of the recent revelations, this made a great deal more sense than it once had, although certainly not all the mystery was gone.

It was also true that any other mage would likely find the power required from the Darkwards prohibitive, should they attempt to cast them for more than a few hours. Not so for Lady Van Dyne and Mgr. Pym. Like his wife, Mgr. Pym was capable of shrinking himself down to minute sizes – the size-changing spell had been his invention, in fact.

“Your aid would still be valued with whatever equipment we might bring. Once underground, to return to the surface constantly would waste far too much time... your talents would prevent the need for that.” Casting Darkwards from a distance was nearly as taxing as casting them over a large target – any equipment, therefore, must be kept near at hand, and small. Lady Van Dyne and Mgr. Pym were uniquely suited to saving Lord Stark’s proposed expedition from becoming a logistical nightmare.

“Well, I suppose you could hardly take a cloudchaser down there,” Mgr. Pym joked weakly.

“In which case you could use a second flier,” said Lady Van Dyne, sharply amused. “One not wearied by their method of transport.” Her wings were her pride and joy – and she was the only mage in the city to fly by transmutation rather than evocation. Flight for an evoker was a constant expenditure of magic, and limited to the very powerful; through transmutation, however, Lady Van Dyne could fashion new muscles and fly as if born to it.

She squeezed her husband’s hand; in return, he put his other hand overtop, so that he clasped hers between his two. Lord Stark looked away, from politeness or some other habit, as husband and wife shared a long, wordless communication – a conversation that required no voice. They reached the same conclusion both independently and as one unit.

“Of course we will come,” Lady Van Dyne declared. “It will be... something of an adventure.” She paused. Lord Stark had gone briefly boneless in the peculiar way of a person suddenly relieved of a great weight, and appeared quite unable to speak; to cover his lack of reply, she continued, “We shall need a few days to make arrangements, however. And although I do not think that the public should be told, not yet, some of the University Council certainly must.”

“I shall be leaving instructions regarding the Dweomer to Mga. Danvers, in the event that... events go ill,” said Lord Stark carefully, recovering his composure. “I cannot lie to you – they may go very badly indeed. This is not a safe expedition.”   

“You do not really think that the anchor could have been moved, though,” said Mgr. Pym. “There’s no one down there to move it – you reported that yourself.”

Lord Stark’s eyes went distant, lost in uncomfortable memory. “I’ve not seen anything down on the surface,” he managed at last, “yet at times... there are things, further away in the shadows, which I sometimes think have moved between glances.”

Lady Van Dyne shivered, looking appropriately horrified for a moment; then she returned to her usual practicality and said, “We shall have to be on the lookout, then.”

“I always have wondered if there might be some species of insect that could survive even the Dark,” Mgr. Pym mused, beginning to sound almost enthusiastic about the whole idea. Lady Van Dyne reached over and patted his hand, and they shared a private smile.

“I am very grateful to you,” Lord Stark said quietly.

“Nonsense, my lord, it is our duty to the Cities,” said Lady Van Dyne. She was uncomfortably certain, suddenly, that had they refused, he would have had no one else to ask. He would have gone alone – and, she was equally certain, doomed himself thereby. “It is also our duty as mages. Is it not in the oath we swear upon earning our Masteries? ‘I shall seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge; and in the seeking let it harm none.’”

“Perhaps,” allowed Lord Stark.

 

 

A pleasant evening arrived and passed; Lord Anthony Stark saw none of it, nor anything of his bed. Messages were sent out, and the next morning, an unamused Jarvis dragged his recalcitrant lord from the bowels of the laboratory and lured him into the smaller visiting parlour with a large carafe of coffee. His visitor was already there: one Mr. James Rhodes, personal pilot and close confidant of Lord Stark – although he could not be said to have enjoyed the latter position very much over the past year, having spent nearly all his recent time away from New York in performance of the former role.

Mr. Rhodes and Lord Stark had met long after childhood (although some members of Society, and indeed even of the general public, might be inclined to comment that Lord Stark’s ascent to actual _adulthood_ had been in doubt until well after their friendship had begun, beset by such perils and pitfalls as irresponsible young women, irresponsible young men, expensive liqueurs, and of course, the University). Yet the nature of their acquaintance and correspondence was such that they forewent a handshake in favour of an embrace. Jarvis met Mr. Rhodes’ slight nod with a small smile, and slipped out the door as the guest poured a cup of coffee for his dearly un-rested host.

“Did you just return?” Lord Stark inquired, after inhaling his first cup and while Mr. Rhodes poured him a second. “I had thought you’d not make it in time.”

“Lord Xavier’s message was persuasive about the need for haste,” said Mr. Rhodes. His expression did a rather admirable job of not betraying his thoughts on this matter. Lord Xavier held both the Enchantment Seat and a second Mastery in Illusion; most persons whom he summoned from a far distance never spoke a word about the experience after, but they tended to wear far more shaken expressions.

Lord Stark, on the other hand, had held an extended conversation with Lord Xavier in just such a fashion not more than a few hours ago, and was one of the few who could claim to have walked away from such a situation entirely unruffled – although this might have had more to do with the limited quantity of sleep Lord Stark had had in the past few days. He nodded at Mr. Rhodes’ explanation and carried straight on, “I need you to pilot the _Maria_ for me out on a long trip – a few weeks, perhaps, or even longer.”

“You’ve taken up studying weather again?” Mr. Rhodes asked with some surprise. Although it was not unknown for Lord Stark to achieve flashes of brilliant insight which then led to manic fits of spellcrafting – it seemed unlikely that a man like Lord Xavier would consider such feats... urgent. It seemed rather more likely to Mr. Rhodes that Lord Xavier would have summoned home Lord Stark’s closest friend in an attempt to impose some sanity upon the man. But the message from Lord Xavier – brief though it had been, over such a distance – had explicitly stated the opposite.

“So the public will be informed,” Lord Stark said, curling his fingers around his coffee mug and unconsciously hunching his shoulders in until he had a wholly possessive look about him. “It makes for a good excuse, doesn’t it? I’ll promise them a new class of cloudchaser by next year, I suppose. I’ll go out with you, of course, quite visibly on the _Maria_ and with enough supplies for two people for six months – or three months for four – but we’re going to meet up with a few friends along the way, and after that I’ll take my leave of you. Then all you’ll have to do is keep the _Maria_ away from anyone else for a bit – not hard for you!”

Put in such a manner it was an unenviable assignment, and Mr. Rhodes’ frown deepened. He was a first-class pilot, the only man in history to have flown a cloudchaser through the upper reaches of the Dark – saving Lord Stark’s skin during one of their many misadventures – and could handle hurricanes with relative ease. Months of acting as a decoy would be a deeply boring task, and would hardly test his skill in any fashion. As he opened his mouth to demand an explanation, however, he was interrupted by a deep thudding noise echoing from the front hall: someone was using a great deal of force to knock on the heavy front doors.

“Light, who is that?” Mr. Rhodes demanded, standing at once. Jarvis would be the only other servant in the house, and in the good pilot’s opinion, neither he nor Lord Stark were in any condition to defend themselves from anyone who could knock quite so hard as _that_! Lord Stark, of course, had other opinions on the matter; and so it was that the pair of them together half-ran into the grand entranceway, just in time to see Jarvis draw back the door with frosty civility.

The man standing beyond was not what one would have considered to possess great strength; but he did possess a mighty walking stick – more a club than anything else. Lord Stark looked at it in distinct irritation, but anyone else in Society would have scoffed, considering it a great waste of precious real oak. It was the end of the walking stick which the visitor had applied to the door, while his hand was still some halfway down its length, so that the force of his blows was made much greater by the leverage.

“Good morning, sir,” Jarvis said. The temperature in the room dropped several degrees.

The man in the doorway looked taken aback, and his gaze went to the club. Instantly, his expression turned contrite. “Forgive me,” he begged. “That was inexcusable rudeness. I was so caught up in my enthusiasm that I had no thought for courtesy. But I pray, do not turn me away, Lord Stark,” his eyes lit upon the man so addressed, “for I must speak with you.”

“Do we know each other?” Lord Stark asked, eyes narrowed.

The uninvited guest shook his head with a rueful smile. “All of New York knows of you, my Lord, but we have never met before; save that I dreamed of you last night.”

Mr. Rhodes coughed uncomfortably; Jarvis, however, sensing some unspoken cue from his Lord, stepped aside to let their visitor enter. He did so leaning upon his club to walk; unlike so many of Society, his use of the cane was not mere affectation (though none in Society would have touched such a gnarled stick of wood if they had been lacking an entire leg).

“You’re not a mage,” said Lord Stark, pacing about him as Jarvis took his coat. Mr. Rhodes watched his friend carefully; the sunlight that the grand windows of the front hall let in showed exactly how bloodshot Lord Stark’s eyes were, and the paleness of his face beneath the dirt and scruff.

“I am not,” said the visitor. “I am a doctor – Dr. Donald Blake. And it seems to me, my Lord,” he too was watching Lord Stark carefully now, but despite his earlier words, it was with something _colder_ than a doctor’s concern for a man obviously in a state of high excitement, “that you were already quite aware of that.”  

Lord Stark threw back his head and laughed for some seconds, startling all present. When at last he contained his mirth somewhat, he clapped his hands together and crowed, “Oh, well done!” His eyes danced merrily. “Not all my titles are for show, doctor; of course I knew of you.”

Dr. Blake bowed low, leaning heavily upon his cane. When he rose his expression was not entirely amused, but there was more resignation present than anger, and his good humour appeared restored to Mr. Rhodes’ suspicious eye. “Then if I say that I dreamed last night that in two days you would be taking a journey, and that it was imperative that I accompany you, would you still listen to me despite knowing that I have devoted my life to healing, and not to magic?”

“I would,” said Lord Stark, much to Mr. Rhodes’ amazement; and he gestured both his guests back toward the visiting parlour. “But not without more coffee.”

More coffee was procured and poured. Lord Stark downed one cup straight, frowned at it, and poured himself another. Dr. Blake, upon taking a sip of his coffee, raised an eyebrow at Mr. Rhodes; Mr. Rhodes stared back at him levelly, and after casting an appraising glance in Lord Stark’s direction, Dr. Blake gave the pilot a small nod. If he picked up on this byplay, Lord Stark gave no sign of it; his attention appeared fully devoted to his coffee, and the brandy which had by now made its customary appearance.

“If you’re not a mage, doctor, then how is it you dream of true things?” Mr. Rhodes asked at length, when it was apparent that Lord Stark would be content to continue frowning at his coffee for quite some time. “It sounds like witchcraft.”

That, at least, attracted Lord Stark’s attention; his gaze snapped up and he scoffed. “Witchcraft, by Light? Rhodey, please. Let us not decry the gentleman as a charlatan. ”

“Then what do you think it is, my Lord?” Dr. Blake asked. His eyes were shadowed by a great weight.

“I don’t know.” Lord Stark sighed and ran a hand through his hair – ordinarily a practice that would have earned him an invisible, disapproving glare from Jarvis, but in his present state the gesture hardly made matters any worse. “Certainly no magic that I understand, although of course, I haven’t devoted a great deal of study toward it.” His leaned back in his chair with a speculative look; if he hadn’t been in such disarray, it might even have been called _predatory_. “I hadn’t thought you’d appreciate it, doctor.”

“Long ago, I would have,” Dr. Blake said quietly. “But these past few decades I have been happy.” His shoulders slumped.

Mr. Rhodes’ eyebrows raised in an expression of surprise, for Dr. Blake could not have been more than perhaps thirty years old, making the words seem pretentious – and yet there was nothing of pretension about the man. “If I may ask...?” He spoke with some diffidence, for although the question was obvious, equally so was the quiet pain about the doctor.

“Some eighty-seven years ago, I awoke in this city,” Dr. Blake said with a weary smile. “I knew nothing – not where I had come from, not even my own name. I am fortunate that I was found by those who would help me, but alas, their ability to do so was limited. But time is a great equalizer, and I found I had much of that; I have not aged a day. Nor have I found the answers to my past, but I have been happy – married these many long years.” He looked down at his left hand, and drawn by his gaze, so too did the other two men; there was a simple wedding band upon his ring finger. “But immortality is not contagious.”

Lord Stark’s expression shuttered; he murmured condolences. Mr. Rhodes, made wrong-footed by sudden claims of immortality, was a moment behind him.

“Thank you,” said Dr. Blake, and for a very long time he was silent.

“But the dreams – that is new. You did not dream true decades ago,” Lord Stark said, seeming to jerk back to full wakefulness all a sudden.

“When I last asked the Magistrars of the University for aid? No. My dream this past night is the first time this has occurred to me, in all my years that I remember.” Dr. Blake grimaced, a small downturn of his mouth.

“Tell me of this dream, then.”

“I was upon a high square tower, looking down,” said Dr. Blake. “A staircase wound around it, and we were walking down it, you and I; and two others, a man and a woman. Two flights of stairs we climbed down, and so by it I somehow knew you planned to leave in two days; and by that time the sun had set from high noon and been swallowed up by the Darkness below. A hand reached out from the Dark, and you reached out for it – but when I looked again it was a stranger, and you were the one within the Darkness.” A look of intense frustration passed over his face. “I could not move forward; I could not lift my walking stick from the stairs.”

“You had that same walking stick eighty years ago,” Lord Stark observed.

Dr. Blake blinked at him, looking taken aback. “Yes.”

“Has it ever failed you before?”

The doctor shook his head. “Never. It is sturdier than any tree. As I believe your man will attest to,” he added, his face tinged with pink. “I _am_ sorry about the door. I awoke in such a state – I knew who you were and what I had to do.” He was leaning forward in his chair now, his walking stick balanced across his knees, and his whole self suffused with earnestness. “I had given up looking for answers decades ago, or so I thought. I have not regretted it, nor do I do so now; just the opposite. But my life has changed. Eighty years ago I knew not where to look, so I looked to the mages, to their towers in the sky – that seemed the right course of action to take. But I am certain now I was incorrect. My answers lie in the Darkness below – and you are the one man who can take me there, I think.” He met Lord Stark’s eyes squarely.

“Into the Dark? Tony, have you gone mad?” Mr. Rhodes leaned forward, wholly irate; it was a wonder he did not jump to his feet. “I thought you’d tired of all that – and I thanked the Light, that I would no longer have to fear your corpse disappearing in those depths!”

Lord Stark winced. “I _am_ sorry, Rhodey,” he said, and to his credit he did sound truly contrite. “But this... is not a thing of whimsy. Dr. Blake, if you had approached me at any other time, I should have been happy to aid you; but time now is of the essence, and I cannot spare it.” He glanced apologetically at the cane. “You would slow us down, I fear, and that would be catastrophic.”

“I have worked on cloudchasers and skydocks; and I walk ten miles every Sunday and Wednesday. I will not slow you down.”

The two men locked expressions, both uncompromising; one, the suddenly high and remote Lord Stark – though rather diminished by his current state – and the other, a doctor of indeterminate age, his full years now visible to the perceptive eye.

Mr. Rhodes looked between the two, and broke their stalemate for them. “Enough; Tony, _explain._ ”

Lord Stark obliged him. It was a brief explanation; there followed a great many arguments from Mr. Rhodes, but they were futile arguments, as he had known from the outset. At last, his old friend worn down to resigned acceptance, Lord Stark yawned and glanced at the grandfather clock in the corner, where the hands were pointed at half nine. “Light, I shall have to ask Jarvis how old this coffee is,” he muttered, mostly to himself. “It’s not doing a damn thing.”

“Then you might as well go to bed, if you’re so set on haring off like a mad fool in two days,” Mr. Rhodes grumbled.

“Nonsense. I’ll – ” another great yawn split his face, and Lord Stark sagged into the couch cushions. “ – perhaps think better after a nap,” he mumbled, and Jarvis appeared to shuffle him off.

Mr. Rhodes and Dr. Blake were left sitting in the parlour; the doctor picked up his own cup of coffee and sipped it thoughtfully. “I’ve always thought decaffeinated coffee to be something of an abomination, but I must admit, this is an impressive blend.”

“Jarvis does good work – though if he hadn’t been so tired, no doubt Tony would have recognized it.” Mr. Rhodes’ voice was cold, but this fact was lessened by the use of the familiar name, and all the worry that managed to attach himself to it. “At least he is bringing along a doctor, I suppose. Mgr. Pym and Lady Van Dyne – ” Mr. Rhodes grimaced, and he looked away. “I would not speak ill of them, but when I speak of mages with more Masteries than sense, all three qualify.”

“A doctor whose dreams chase him over to the manors of unfamiliar lords,” Dr. Blake reminded him wryly. “If you look to me to impose sanity I am afraid I must disappoint you.”

“Fear not; you have already done so,” Mr. Rhodes said with a hard look, for in truth Dr. Blake had been of no help at all to Mr. Rhodes’ opposition to Lord Stark’s plans, and occasionally quite the detriment.

“If it is within my power to see him home safe, I will do so,” said Dr. Blake, and Mr. Rhodes grimaced and forced himself to be content with that.

 

 

 

“Do you really think this wise?” Mgr. Pym asked his wife two days later as they stood inside one of the _Maria_ ’s bulkheads. The cloudchaser was a medium-weight, perfect for both lengthy explorations and – after a great deal of personal attention by Lord Stark – capable of beating out even a great many light-weight ‘chasers for speed.

“It’s a bit late to be having second thoughts, dearest,” Lady Van Dyne returned. She spoke in a low voice, although she scarcely needed to; already the dock workers responsible for stocking the _Maria_ had left, and the other three occupants of the ship were all up in the cockpit, far away from being able to overhear them. But both she and her husband were still somewhat in the grips of flushed excitement from sneaking onto the ship – not hard, at their present sizes. Their strength increased in comparison to their size as they shrunk, enabling the Lady to carry Mgr. Pym without extraordinary effort, even in flight.

“Oh, I have been having them ever since Anthony brought us down to his... _lair_. He’s not well.” He gave his wife a somewhat annoyed look. “And if I can see it, I know you can’t have missed it. Staring into the Dark as a pastime, stars above.”

“We’ll keep an eye on him,” Lady Van Dyne promised. “Darkness or no, this scheme of his is sounder than any other option I can think of.”

“If only it didn’t involve hiding on a cloudchaser,” Mgr. Pym moaned, as their hiding-place wobbled with the last minute preparations for flight.

To be fair to Lord Stark, their current deception was no suggestion of his at all; it had been Lady Van Dyne’s idea to announce that she and her husband were leaving for a private, romantic vacation to New Amsterdam, so as to cover their own absence from New York. _Their_ private cloudchaser had left several hours earlier – and if they never once emerged from their chambers even upon arrival, then their staff were far too fond of them to carry gossip that their employers might not, in fact, be on the ship at all.

The cabinet they were hiding in rocked more violently now as, outside, the _Maria’s_ enormous floats ballooned with lighter-than-air gas, and husband and wife clung to both each other and to the wooden walls. It was a very smooth take-off, considering the high winds of the day, but of course all small motions were suddenly much larger for persons standing only two inches tall. For this venture Lady Van Dyne had forgone all her skirts; she was dressed entirely sensibly, though of course still extremely fashionably, in cheerful, vivid yellow silk that followed the shape of her figure in a most becoming fashion; and although she wore trousers, they were gathered and buttoned in such a fashion that they somehow appeared to have been transfigured into a dress – all without restricting her movement in the slightest. In the back of her mind she was already considering new windswept fashions; weather-related phenomena cropped up in Society’s tastes every few seasons, and Lady Van Dyne was always ahead of the curve.

“There, I think we can get out, now,” Lady Van Dyne ventured a few minutes after the worst of the bouncing had subsided – the internal cue that the _Maria_ ’s wings had swept out from her sides to provide stability and direction to their flight.

“Let’s,” Mgr. Pym groaned. Not the easiest sailor, he had turned an alarming pale shade during that first critical minute before the wings could be extended. “I do not care if we are caught.”

They grew some – enough to push the bulkhead open – and then jumped out, each growing to full size in midair, so that by the time their feet hit the floor it was hardly more than a step down. Immediately, Lady Van Dyne crossed over to the portholes lining the cloudchaser’s side and looked out, although she kept herself back a ways, in case anyone watching had a good telescope. New York was fast falling behind them; they had crossed over the bounds of the city wall, and now the Dark could be seen stretching out below them, barely covered by a few whiffs of low-hanging clouds. From further off the city began to look like a lumpy disk, a once-flat coin that had been dented here and there, beaten out of shape. Once, history told, it had more closely resembled the upside-down mountain that it was built from – but the underside of its great structure had been mined away extensively over the years for the raw materials required to build upward, ever upward. Almost every section of the city was now covered in towers, great mage-structures stretching to the sky; New York had been the first of the Flying Cities, and it was still the most crowded. But atop and amidst all those towers was greenery, trees and creeping vines planted everywhere, tiny parks that the population could enjoy; and Lady Van Dyne wore an expression of fondness as she looked back upon her home, before a large, dense patch of clouds suddenly obscured the view. She jumped back slightly from the window, and frowned in the direction of the cockpit.

“Oh, I hope that pilot knows what he’s doing,” Mgr. Pym groaned from behind her, where he stood with a hand bracing himself against the wall. Cloudchasers were so named because they _chased_ clouds, or went around them – only those who didn’t mind the possibility of collision went _through_ them, for the water concentrated in the air obscured such divination spells as were used for flying at night.

“Mr. Rhodes is an excellent pilot,” Lady Van Dyne assured her husband, perhaps somewhat more strongly than she herself felt. But it had to be admitted that the cloud cover made quite sure that no one could get a good look at the passengers of this ship, who were meant to number only three: it was excellent weather to cover the couple’s story of a private vacation out in New Amsterdam. “Come, Hank, you know your skysickness will be better with some fresh air flowing by.”

Holding steadily to the hand-rails, they made their way up to the cockpit, where much to their dismay they found that Mr. Rhodes was _not_ currently their pilot; rather, it was Lord Stark who sat in the chair, hands firmly upon the controls, and firmly engaged in an argument with Mr. Rhodes. “There, nothing happened,” he was insisting as the two Transmutation Magistrars entered. “You’re being over-protective, Rhodey! That was marvelous, I haven’t gotten to do a straight takeoff like that in ages.”

“And you shan’t be doing one again,” Mr. Rhodes said firmly. “ _Out._ ”

Dr. Blake, standing at one side over by the vents, tapped the floor with his cane; Lady Van Dyne did not quite manage to conceal a wince at the sight of the hideous thing. “Come, my lord,” he said, his voice already gaining some of that steady patience so necessary for those used to spending long amounts of time with Lord Stark. “There are more preparations to be made, if we are to be on the ground within the day.” There was more enthusiasm in his voice for the concept than from the rest of the cabin combined.

“Ah, enough with the ‘my lord’s, Blake; titles will get wearisome very quickly,” Lord Stark said, getting up from the pilot’s chair with a none-too-gentle helping hand from Mr. Rhodes. “But of course, you are right,” he added hastily, rubbing at his arm where the pilot had gripped.

“Then no ‘my lady’s either,” Lady Van Dyne declared, and she planted her hands firmly upon her hips when all of the men in the room turned to look at her, appalled. “We are Magistrars and doctors and pilots in this room – creatures of _action_ , gentlemen.”

“Well said, Van Dyne,” Stark surrendered with a laugh; upon seeing his reaction Blake nodded in concession as well, although not without visible reluctance. “Forward, then – let us act!”

 

 

Action, for the next few hours, involved a great deal of sorting through supplies, checking and double-checking that they were suitable, then giving them to Pym and Van Dyne to be shrunken down and tied to tether-strings. In deference to Pym’s potential skysickness, they had cracked all the windows in the hold wide open, and thus were quite often forced to pause their work to chase down loose bits of packaging that had been blown away by the stiff breeze.

As they worked, they spoke; Blake asked eagerly of their experiences in the Dark, and although Van Dyne and Pym were not looking forward to the enveloping grip of the Darkness, neither could deny the surge of excitement they felt when Stark spoke of the surface of the Earth – for of them all, only he had visited it before. Both Pym and Van Dyne had dipped into the upper reaches of the Dark to receive proof positive that they had mastered the complex Darkwards, but they had hardly been inclined to go further down.

For a time it was a great deal like those days where, upon completing the testing of the Darkwards, the triumphant young Lord Stark had re-emerged to both the University and Society and scandalized all and sundry with his daring tales of the alien nature of the lost world below; before the perpetual gloom had worn away at the people and they had begun to think him entirely strange for dwelling upon the matter at such length. Of course, Stark had already seen the change in the winds and moved onto a new exciting discovery, a shield spell that acted so much like solid ground as to allow the easy expansion of the Cities; now, faced with the prospect of viewing the ground themselves, it was a choice between giving in to either enthusiasm or despair: and both Pym and Van Dyne were, at heart, stubborn souls.

“No light down there, of course,” Stark explained. “Fire burns perfectly well – I spent days studying exothermic reactions down there, looking for a difference, but there are none I can detect if the wood is warded. Yet even then the light goes nowhere – only Light allows one to see.” The subtle difference in his emphasis made it clear what he was speaking of: Soul-Light, or as it was once called, Paladin-Light.

Superficially it was the domain of all mages practised enough at the art to learn the spell, but it had been the ancient Paladins of old who could summon Light and use it in their innate spellcraft: more limited than proper magic, and even now the basis for so many misunderstandings about what proper magic could _do_. Light in the hands of a mage was a blessed thing, apt to calm the tempers of those who looked upon it; Light in the hands of a Paladin was said to have been able to heal physical wounds. Though the Magistrars of the Conjuration and Transfiguration schools had long searched for ways to be able to replicate the feat, there remained no spell to knit flesh, nor to cure any sort of illness. Frustrating their efforts, of course, was the fact that no Paladin had survived the Rising: nearly all had perished in the few years before when the Second Chaos War swept over the lands, and the Last Paladin, their foremost captain, had been lost at the very end of that catastrophic War, when the Darkness bursting forth from beneath York had rendered all human conflict immaterial.  

“But the surface itself – tell us of that,” Blake asked, flipping over packages and parcels of food to check them off. It was all very slap-shod: had this been a proper University expedition, all the supplies would long since have been taken care of; but their great haste necessitated that it be done at the last minute, for there were no earlier minutes at which it _could_ have been done. “I recall from the papers your statement that there were no trees, no signs of life at all; but do you truly think that nothing lives down there?”

“I have never been to the ground, but I was never able to make contact with any insects from the air,” Pym noted, earning himself a startled but discreet look from Blake.

“Of course, there could be some that I did not see,” Stark made a half-aborted shrug as he spelled wards onto another crate – not Darkwards, but protections against shifting, damage and rot. “It would take more effort than even I could expend to summon lasting Light that would banish back the Dark for more than fifty paces. But the air down there is still, oppressive; there is no wind, nor sound from above, and I heard no noise. Occasionally it would seem that something moved in the distance, but whenever I arrived at that point, there would be nothing but the same dull grey rock.”

“Yet what of York? The fabled mage-towers there were said to soar far higher than those of modern times.”

“An incorrect belief, though there is truth in that they soared very high indeed. But I have found nothing of such things. I do not even know where the center of York is; I have never seen any buildings, or anything to mark that a human soul set foot upon that stone. It is possible that the Dark has eaten everything, wearing it down over the years until naught but stone remains.”

“And the current anchor,” Van Dyne said thoughtfully. “Can you not determine its location to a rough degree?”

“Without my full laboratory at hand, I shall need to be much closer. For the first leg, we shall have to rely upon compasses – directional magic is unreliable.” One corner of Stark’s mouth quirked downward as he said this: a suitably understated reaction to a memory of a very nearly lethal event. He pressed the tips of his fingers to the crate he had been warding and magic flared, a small but intense white-blue that vanished a moment later. He stepped back and cast his gaze about the nearly empty-hold. “Are we done, then?”

The others looked about as well; Blake, who had been keeping the records, nodded. “Nearly so.”

“We shall stay and finish,” Van Dyne said, putting a hand upon her husband’s shoulder and giving a gentle squeeze; without looking, he caught her fingers in his own and squeezed back. “You should go check with Mr. Rhodes.”

Stark nodded, brushing dust from his clothes and taking his leave; his footsteps sounded down the passageway, and the three remaining members of the company looked at each other in awkward silence, for none had met before Lord Stark’s brusque introduction the previous day. Blake, large hands suddenly clumsy, picked up one of the strings of parcels that Jan had tied together and squinted at it, beginning to double-check the large-print writing on the side of each against the list that he had already made while they remained of normal size.

Husband and wife glanced at each other; Van Dyne gave a small nod, and Pym shrugged helplessly. “Dr. Blake,” he began formally, waiting for the other to look up again, “there is more that you should know about the Dark than what we have said so far.”

“Please, the title is not necessary,” Blake said quietly. He cast a glance at the door. “This could not be said in front of Lord Stark?”

“Perhaps,” Pym admitted. “He may have already told you, but – the Dark has a... habit, of weighing upon one’s mind. It is not merely the oppressive lack of light; there is a detectable magical effect, although I had not fully measured it in my own experiments and to be honest, did not wish to try. But if you have doubts – I would advise you, no, beg of you, to reconsider accompanying us. The Dark will break open any weakness.” The words were spoken with the bleak tone of experience; Van Dyne gripped his hand more tightly.

Blake paused, looking between them with keen eyes, seeing the way they supported each other. “I have doubts, of course. In my rational mind I have every doubt. But in my heart...” he shook his head. “There is no room for such considerations. I _must_ do this.” He paused. “But that is not the sole reason for your warning.”

“Stark has locked himself away for three months,” said Van Dyne. “And it seems likely that he’s spent the entire time diving down into the Dark to look for that damned anchor on day trips. He has never been the most _stable_ of personalities.” She glanced away – an excusable tell among friends not of Society.

Stark had toasted her and Pym at their wedding – but had they been drifting apart since even then? This business with the Dark had blindsided her; of all the problems to concern the High Wizard, she’d not dared dream of the truth. She could not help but feel that she would have known better, sooner, when they were children... but he had changed. They both had. It was the way of children grown into adulthood, and yet that did not mean the loss was not worth noting, or mourning.

“You think he shall succumb?” Blake asked, frowning with a doctor’s concern.

“We think,” Van Dyne gave her husband another squeeze, and he gave her a small, adoring smile in return, “that he shall need a close eye, and the support of friends.”

“These he shall have,” Blake promised.

Quickly returning footsteps broke their discussion, and they returned hurriedly to their tasks; Stark was returning after only a few minutes. “We are here,” he announced, entering, and flicking his hand up, palm at a right angle to the floor, he cast a projection of a map into thin air. Despite how he had been surrounded by the act of it for the past two hours, Blake was yet unused to such careless magical acts, and looked impressed; Van Dyne and Pym, on the other hand, were simply interested in the map’s contents. It showed their path of the last two hours – a wide circle, bringing them to not more than five miles from New York itself; it was a good thing for their secrecy that they were hidden in the substantial cloud-cover, but both Pym and Van Dyne, realizing the other implications of that, closed their eyes and gave silent thanks that they had encountered no difficulties.

True to Stark’s words, a few seconds later the ship began experiencing that curious light rocking characteristic of setting a cloud-anchor. Both Stark and Blake began bedecking themselves in the luggage strings, while Pym and Van Dyne finished with the last ones; there was no point in the latter two carrying luggage, however, as they would be shrunk down the vast majority of the time, and if their strength grew proportionally than it still lessened absolutely with their spells.

They had not quite completed all their preparations by the time Mr. Rhodes came to fetch them, but with the pilot’s help and their own forced eagerness, they were soon well-prepared. Pym and Van Dyne shrunk, and Van Dyne grasped her husband’s hands and lifted him easily to Blake’s shoulder, whereupon Pym cast a tether to the (now much larger) man so that he would not fall. They all made their way to the open deck above: a small deck, for the _Maria_ ’s owner had not much use for large parties upon her – he had other, larger, less-favoured cloudchasers for that.

The dismal grey clouds were all above, now; they were very near to the upper edges of the Dark, and its gloom seemed to make the daylight above even dimmer. It was an empty, featureless black mass: entirely relentless, entirely inhuman. Only Van Dyne permitted herself to openly shiver, but she was not the only one to feel a chill.

“You are all of you mad,” said Mr. Rhodes, staring down at it. He placed a hand upon Stark’s arm. “Tony – do _not_ get yourself killed down there.”

“Certainly,” said Stark, and snapped his fingers. Blue-white fire lines appeared about his wrists, and spread across his body, entwining and winding about him until they reached his feet: the powerful flight spells he had designed as a young mage-student. “Blake?”

With visible reluctance, Mr. Rhodes let go of his friend and stepped back; Dr. Blake stepped forward instead, and took Lord Stark’s offered hand without hesitation. The spell-lines poured over to him as well, and with but a thought from Stark, they both rose into the air, Pym grabbing hold of the equipment straps on Blake’s coat to steady himself. A moment later they were over the side of the rail and disappearing into the darkness.

Van Dyne stayed a moment longer, hovering, her wings _whirring_ faintly. “We will be careful, Mr. Rhodes,” she promised, her voice full of compassion – and then she, too, was gone, diving down into the Darkness below.

Rhodes stepped forward and placed his hands on the rail, leaning over and watching them. Many times before he had seen his friend make this descent; but never for more than a few hours at a time, and never for such stakes, in such a hurry. The light of their spells was swallowed quickly; for a moment, there was a brief flare in the Dark as at least one of the Magistrars summoned Light, but then even that, too, was gone.

“Come home safe,” Rhodes murmured after them, and then turned to make his way back to the cockpit.

“Spells that are failing, for reasons unknown,” Lady Van Dyne said sharply. “You cannot be certain your diagnostics are not failing as well. What of the other cities?”


	2. The Greydark

At first, as they began their descent, the daylight still reached them; it was not then like travelling through darkness as it was like travelling through a dismal grey mist. But unlike proper mist or cloud, it did not come between the three men and the lady who flitted about them; rather it began at the edges of their vision and then closed over their heads, all-encompassing – a strangely claustrophobic effect, considering that they were yet flying in open sky.

When greyness thickened so much that the light began to fade, however, Stark halted their abrupt downward motion and they remained there, hovering in the air. Below them, blackness stretched out. “Van Dyne,” Stark called, gaining her attention. “Time to put up the wards.”

Both Van Dyne and Pym had been practicing exactly that for the past three days, as they had not been for the past years; by now, though neither could summon the protection as easily as Stark, they were confident as they began the rote gestures and murmured equations. Deep red light crawled from their skin, and then sank back into it and their clothing, protective but invisible. Stark, on the other hand, simply blinked: and there his Darkwards were, ready and already covering Blake, as well. Van Dyne and Pym exchanged a glance at this clear indication of long practice: neither needed any more effort for their own size-changing spells, but those did not carry nearly the implications as such familiarity with the Darkwards did.

“Here,” Stark said, and shook his free right hand. On his wrist he wore a leather bracelet strung with crystals, as did the other two mages; now, one crystal burst forth with Light, and immediately all four felt themselves relax as they were bathed in its glow. Although they yet remained mid-air with no external point of reference, the disorientation that Pym and Blake felt, unused to flying as they were, subsided.

“One of us should be doing that,” Pym said. Light was a purer power than proper magic – but it took a larger toll. Stark was already maintaining Blake’s Darkwards, and when he and Blake were both much larger than Pym or Van Dyne, too. Light also required constant concentration, unlike standard wards, even the Darkwards.

“Certainly, in time,” Stark agreed readily. “But for this portion it is best you have less distractions, I think.”

“When we reach the surface,” Van Dyne said firmly. Stark tilted his head in acknowledgement.

They continued downward. The air grew constantly dimmer, and constantly stiller; soon there was no wind at all, and even in their swift passage it seemed that they were not stirring up the air but simply moving it the minimum distance to displace it from their path, after which it would return to motionlessness. The red hues of the Darkwards grew stronger, visible again as grey became black, and then, somehow, blacker; and although there was still no point of external reference, it now seemed that the Light’s reach did not extend so far, and the reassurance granted by its glow faded beneath the weight of the blackness all around them.

At long last, however – although had any checked their pocket-watches, they would have found it took no more than two minutes all told – Stark let out a satisfied, “Ah,” prompting the others to look downward. What had made him speak so took a moment longer to become obvious; and then the other three realized that the dark grey below was dark _grey_ , not more blackness; they had reached the ground.

Stark landed unceremoniously; Blake, however, tottered as the blue-white spell-lines of Stark’s flight spell released him, and set his cane down with perhaps more force than was needed. The stone released only a very muted thud as the wood contacted it, as though it were muffled by velvet.

Van Dyne landed, her form tiny compared to the two men standing nearby, and knelt, pressing her palms to the stone as her wings stilled. “The Earth,” she said, and there was a note of reverence in her voice that none of her Society training could hide.

The ground – true _ground_ – stretched out around them... a sight unseen in a hundred years, save by one. It did not matter that it was dull and flat; to humans who had lived skybound all their lives, it was a miracle. How must it have been, a hundred years before, when human existence was defined by the Earth and not the Sky? Or had humanity always looked upward? Would their ancestors congratulate them for reaching to the stars, or condemn them for daring to make their home in the heavens themselves?

“A moment,” Pym muttered, and he hopped from Blake’s shoulder, releasing the tethering spell and growing as he did so; a moment later he, too, stood on the Earth, which had been un-walked by humans – excepting the Lord High Wizard who stood beside them now – for a century.

Then he paled dramatically – although it was difficult to tell with the Darkwards now flared into full effect, their red light tinting all vision. He staggered, and it was Blake who steadied him, before Stark could do so as well.

“Hank?” Van Dyne asked, flying up to hover beside his face.

“Apologies,” he murmured, and instantly shrank again; she flew downward while Stark and Blake leaned over the pair of them. “I didn’t think – those Darkwards give something of a kick, covering something large all of a sudden, down here.”

“Careful,” Stark advised. He turned an eye on Blake. “And keep close, doctor. It will be the same if you get too far away.”

“I shall keep near,” promised Blake, looking wholly disturbed at the thought that he could cause such distress.

“There; I am fine now, dearest,” Pym said after a minute more to catch his breath, and with a scolding look of worry his wife flew him back up to Blake’s shoulder; although she then settled beside him, rather than continuing to fly herself, and shook her own bracelet of mage-crystals until they shone with Light.

“I shall take this for a while,” she said briskly. “Hank, you may take over warding Dr. Blake in perhaps an hour.”

“I am alright,” Pym protested. “It was merely that I was unprepared – I should have been perfectly fine if I’d braced myself for it.”

“We shall need to trade off the wards at intervals in any case,” Stark said, raising his hand and letting his own Light fade away. Without the gleam of the two sources of Light, the Darkness seemed to press in even more than before; but Stark, if he felt this, showed no sign of it. Instead he pulled out his compass: a fine, finicky thing that was nonetheless one of the most accurate instruments in the world. Now it earned itself a frown, and he tucked it away, pulling out a more esoteric device in its place: a delicately carved, crystalline blue stone, which hung dully on a silver chain. He frowned at it as well. “This is not an auspicious omen. I’m certain Rhodey tethered us directly over the cave I found, but this terrain is not at all the same. It should have... features.”

Indeed, the stone about them – and there was nothing _but_ stone – seemed unnaturally smooth, like some giant had poured it out into a plaster piece and let it set. It held nothing of the rocky variations that the material of the Flying Cities possessed, no grains or lines; it was smooth in every direction, although occasionally there were faint rises or dips in its surface.

“It is a most unnatural place,” Blake spoke, his voice hushed in the still, oppressive air.

Stark glanced over at him. “You’ve no, hmm, odd feelings about this place?”

Blake’s gaze went unfocused, as though he looked far away, or perhaps inward. But he shook his head a moment later. “None. Perhaps I can only know such things in dreams.”

Both Van Dyne and Pym looked uncomfortable with the topic; the latter furrowed his brow and said, “Are you certain of the coordinates?”

“You saw them yourself.”

“True.” Pym ran a hand over his jaw. “Then perhaps the features have been worn down by the Dark since you found the cave.”

“In ten days?” Stark sounded doubtful.

“Or perhaps the Earth is normally unstable – there is so little we know about it,” Pym said, sounding enthusiastic.

“It does not feel unstable,” Blake said doubtfully, tapping his cane against the stone, and Stark added, “No experiment has even hinted at that.”

“Until now,” Van Dyne said, hands on her hips. “We have two master transmuters, gentlemen; finding a way down beneath the ground shall not be a problem. The important question is how _fast_ the stone can possibly shift, because if we are beneath it when that happens, it shall go poorly for us.”

“Ah, I wouldn’t think it so easy to move the stone aside, Van Dyne,” said Stark. “Extending spell effects beyond one’s own body is more difficult down here than I think you credence.”

“The options I see are to wander off in search of this cave, getting further away from our certain coordinates, or to attempt to go down through the rock until we find the beginnings of some sort of passage. Have you another course?”

Pym shrugged. “You have me convinced, Jan.”

Stark waved a weary hand at them both. “As you see fit. But please be careful not to overtax yourself.”

“That’s a bit rich coming from you, my lord,” Van Dyne said primly, using the title to tip her statement into _just_ the allowable level of insouciance. Stark still narrowed his eyes at her. But her attention was already upon Dr. Blake, who was frowning up at the Darkness above as though he were trying to pierce its murk. “Blake?”

“I am no Magistrar, nor mage at all,” the doctor said, taking a few careful steps around Stark – always staying near him – so he could stare at a different patch of Darkness. But indeed, it was all one and the same. “I defer to your judgement.”

“Well, it won’t hurt to try transmuting a way down,” said Pym. “We can attempt wandering around blindly afterward, if it doesn’t work.”

 

 

Nearly a half-hour later – twenty-nine minutes, six seconds, by Stark’s excellent watch – Pym leaned back from the edge of a three-foot-wide round hole in the rock and collapsed onto the ground, his lungs working to suck in air like a bellows. On the other side of the hole, Van Dyne was sitting with her tiny feet dangling from the ‘ledge’, her elbows planted on her knees as she too panted for breath. Above them towered their normal-sized companions, looking down the hole with a great deal of interest; Stark – who had resumed casting the Light spell some twenty-eight minutes ago – knelt and held his wrist out over the edge.

The two transmutation Magistrars had bored the hole through about six solid feet of stone – a feat that, while not child’s play, should hardly have been any sort of challenge for two Magistrars of their skill; and now they felt thoroughly chastened at not heeding Stark’s earlier words. It was all the more galling, then, how easily he seemed able to cast flight spells upon himself and Blake, allowing them to float easily down to the tunnel revealed beneath; Blake picked up Pym’s tiny form upon the way, and Van Dyne, after she had caught her breath, allowed herself to emulate one of her husband’s more vulgar habits and rolled her eyes before shoving off from the ledge, catching herself in a flutter of wings and landing on Blake’s shoulder.

“You’re using the blasted Dweomer, aren’t you?” Pym accused, still gasping for breath between words. “Drawing extra power from it. That’s why you can cast spells so easily.”

“Er.” Stark hovered for a moment, then dropped to the tunnel floor with less grace than his usual landings. “Well, not exactly. But, hmm, some of the basic principles.”

“Can it be taught?” Van Dyne’s words were barely distinguishable; she had collapsed face down, and her voice was muffled severely by the fabric of Blake’s coat. He tilted his head at an awkward angle to give her a concerned glance.

“It’s not exactly the time or place,” said Stark. “And even if it were, it’s a secret of House Stark. I’d be breaking House mage-oaths to teach it to anyone not a Stark.”

The magistrars stilled, and so did Blake; mage-oaths were not something to break lightly. Pym sat up, not without struggle, and stared at Stark. “You said you’d leave instructions about the Dweomer for Mga. Danvers.”

“Under wards keyed to my death, yes – in which case, long may she enjoy the title of High Wizard.”

“And being so deep within the Dark shall not cause them to trigger prematurely?”

“I’m wagering that they won’t,” Stark said shortly, and strode forward down the tunnel.

Of course, he could hardly leave any of them behind, as Blake immediately followed after him – his cane clicking against the stone floor, and at once Stark slowed so as not to push the man over-hard without cause – and both the other two Magistrars were sitting on Blake’s shoulders. But his action did turn all of their attention to the formation of the tunnel itself. Walls, floor, and ceiling were formed of the same bland stone as the surface. The tunnel itself was about twenty feet high and gently curving; one end obviously tilted downward.

Stark held up his hand, letting more Light pour up to the ceiling. The hole they had entered through remained a black blot; the far ends of the tunnel curved away until they faded in the Darkness. But Stark was studying the ceiling. “This was not naturally formed.”

“And it was done by magic, not by any tool,” said Pym. He rapped on the side of Blake’s head – at his present size, it translated to no more than a gentle tap – and pointed at the wall until Blake obligingly moved close enough that Pym could rest his miniature hand against it. “A simple divination spell ought reveal how long – ow!”

An ugly weal of blackness flared, briefly enveloping Blake’s head and upper torso as the concentration of Darkness overwhelmed the Light from Stark’s bracelet. It cleared within moments, revealing a confused-looking Blake and Pym sitting down on his shoulder, looking dazed; he was clutching at his hand. Van Dyne flew up to hover beside him.

“The Dark likes its secrets,” Stark drawled, and turned away to stride further down the tunnel. Blake stepped after him; Pym was forced to cast another tether to prevent an untimely tumble.

“The rock formation is artificial, but it’s the rock itself that is stranger still. I’ve never seen anything like it in New York. All this blankness... my intuition would have me think it is the Dark itself that so alters it,” Van Dyne speculated, flying back to Blake’s other shoulder to continue recouping her strength; her voice was still hoarse from the earlier effort. “And for someone to then build a tunnel through it... perhaps gives credence to your insane idea that someone might have moved the anchor, Stark.”

For this, she received a short nod from Stark; Blake, however, was more engaged. “I do not understand,” he said. “Should this ‘anchor’ to be moved, would not the city become unstable? A cloudchaser that slips anchor begins to drift almost immediately.”

“Perhaps, perhaps not. The levitation spells the second-year students do – move the anchor on those, and they wobble and fall within moments. But, say, the anchors for the floating towers at the University – they have such large reactances that their power factor lags by days; and the power involved in those spells is considerably less than the amount needed to support the Cities. I confess, I am still half disbelieving you when you say it is simple levitation, Anthony.”

“Disbelieve all you want,” said Stark, and this time the curtness in his voice was quite clear, the rudeness undeniable. The other three were, for a moment, silent – but stymied from sharing a look of concern or understanding between themselves by the miniature size of two of them.

“Stark?” asked Blake.

Stark slowed, then dipped his head ruefully. “Forgive me. I am snappish for no good cause – ‘tis merely that damnable echo.”

“Echo?” asked Pym with a frown, for Stark was not a man much given to metaphor; and here, Pym assumed, he handled it badly, using concepts that had been obscure ever since the Rising.

Yet this was not the case. “Yes. I keep thinking, foolishly - were it a full half-second later, it would not be so jarring,” said Stark. “But the way it comes so quick after – it is... an annoyance. Whomever built these tunnels so had the humour of a troll.”

“Anthony, what are you talking about?” Pym had risen to his feet, using Blake’s ear as a handhold to balance.

Their company had come to a full halt, now, and Stark eyed the three of them with growing worry. “The echo back from the walls. We are in a cave,” he said, as though these two statements ought be connected in some self-evident manner.

“A tunnel, yes,” said Van Dyne, her confusion also evident, but growing to some excitement. “I suppose – why, it is a cave, truly! I had never thought I would stand in one.”

“You were in my laboratory not a few days past,” said Stark, not without exasperation. “Well, this is a large cave, with smooth stone walls – they reflect back sound just as much as the city towers do. Of course there is an echo!”

“Anthony,” said Pym, “this place is as still and as dead as – well, as the Dark itself. I find myself doubting that our words even reach the walls of this tunnel, so quick is the air to swallow and muffle them. There is no echo.”

Stark tilted his head to the side. “You do not hear it?” he asked, and now he too sounded worried. “None of you? As if we all had twins speaking at the same time, almost in tandem – yet still perhaps a tenth of a second behind.”

“I hear nothing of the sort,” Van Dyne confirmed, and Blake shook his head.

“Hmm,” said Stark, and then, with shocking volume, bellowed, “HALLO!”

The other three flinched; the noise seemed almost sacrilegiously enormous in the Dark, open defiance of a power that had not yet been proven tame, no matter what years of docility might attempt to demonstrate. The Dark was meant to be an empty thing; suffocatingly dead. But such a reckless taunt yet still seemed unwise – for what if it was _not_? The tunnel walls were not natural; so what had caused them?

“You’re right,” said Stark after a moment. “If that were a proper echo, then with an increase in volume I should have heard it repeat several times over – the echo echoing, if you take my meaning,” he explained for Blake’s sake. “Yet I heard it only once.” He began walking forward again.

“Could it be something in your protections?” asked Blake, frowning.

“No, or you would be hearing it as well.”

“Then there is something wrong with your ears. Abrupt pressure changes can cause difficulties for cloudchaser pilots,” the doctor suggested.

“Difficulties of this sort? It is hardly a mere ringing in the ears.”

“No,” Blake admitted. “And I am out of my depth with magic. The Dark seems the most probable cause.”

“It cannot be the Dark itself – were it a flaw with Anthony’s wards, you would hear it as well,” said Van Dyne.

“Truth,” said Stark. “Though that does not mean it is not something _in_ the Dark – oh, hello.” The Light shining from within his bracelet suddenly expanded outward, and then stopped; the floor continued now at a steep downward slope, and the walls had dropped away to the side. More cautiously, wary of their boots slipping upon the incline, the company continued forward, Stark keeping a close watch on his compass the entire time – but after perhaps thirty yards, the floor dropped away entirely. The ceiling, meanwhile, receded upward into the Dark.

“A cavern?” asked Van Dyne, flitting into the air. She had already regained a good deal of her colour from her brief rest upon Blake’s shoulder, and now she shook out her own bracelet of light as she ventured upward, extending the bubble of visibility into an odd oblong, one that revealed a cavern roof above – a cavern roof with trusses and supports that, for all they were made of stone, had certainly been artificially engineered. As she flitted forward, the opposite end of the cavern – hole, really – appeared before her – and then she was far enough out that it became apparent that this was _not_ the far wall, but rather, a support column: a truly titanic support column, perhaps ten yards around. The cavern extended around and beyond it – for how far, her Light could not reveal, but somehow there was the impression of a great vastness.

“This may call for a bit more effort,” said Stark, worrying at his own still-Lit bracelet with his teeth and free hand, until one of the gems fell free. He bowed his head over it, and the diamond grew and pulsed with Light – from dimness to daylight, twice, and as the glow built a third time he flicked his wrist and released it. The gem shot forward as though from a catapult, bursting into dazzling intensity as it threw out Light upon its path, revealing a space hundreds of yards across, at the very least; and filled with the same columns, the same great support structures, rising from Darkened depths that even this Light could not penetrate. The gem’s momentum carried it forward a very long way before it began to arc downward and the Light faded; Stark’s shoulders slumped.

“Well,” he said. “I can hardly recall hearing of any structures so great as _that_ in the histories.”

“Perhaps, if mage towers were very different in old York,” said Van Dyne, but her voice was doubting.

Pym snorted. “Well, if there _is_ anything down here, it certainly will know now that it is not alone.”

“Perhaps. I want to take a look at one of those columns,” said Stark.

Passing control of Blake’s Darkwards to Pym was an uncomplicated affair; the doctor bore it not entirely gracefully, but such proof of his vulnerability, his dependence upon the company, would have been hard for any person to bear. He did, however, express concern at Stark’s plan: “Are you still hearing that echo?”

Stark cocked his head to one side, surprised: “No. It has been gone since I cast loose the flare.”

Blue and white spell-lines wrapped about him, a sharp contrast to the red glow of the Darkwards, and lifted him into the air, bringing him close enough to the enormous column that it was once more revealed by his Light spell. Its sides were smooth but unevenly so, as though someone had poured a line of liquid stone down from the cavern roof and it had frozen mid-process. Occasional warps and wafts of stone wrapped around it, as though at one point the stone had been liquid and possessed variations in its flow. As Stark reached the column he put out a tentative hand, closing his eyes. Pym, watching, raised an eyebrow and shared a glance with his wife, the pair of them mutual in their concern that Stark would attempt to cast his own divination spell upon the rock. But instead Stark merely stared upward for a long time – and then all of a sudden flew up and around the column. His Light spell vanished into the Darkness, blocked by the bulk of the rock.

“Stark!” Van Dyne called, her own Light spell briefly flaring greater in response. She flitted forward a bit further, out over the great drop below, and planted her hands on her hips as she muttered, “That man, good Light above.”

“Van Dyne, come look at this,” Stark called. His echoed over and over as it bounced off the columns and the much farther walls of the cavern, making it impossible to determine his location.

Van Dyne nearly started forward – and then paused, her eyes widening. “His voice is echoing.”

The two men remaining on the slope behind – although Blake was easing backward to a safer distance now that there was no one about to catch him should he slip – looked back at her with similarly alarmed expressions, and said in tandem, “No, it isn’t.”

“Stars curse him!” Van Dyne swore, and then repeated the sentiment in far more colourful language; Blake looked appropriately shocked. She glanced toward the place in the Darkness where the column lurked, and back again at the other two: Stark had still not yet emerged. “Stark, damn you, come back! We should stay together!” But there was no reply except the reverberation of her own voice.

“I am going to grow to ten feet and challenge him to a boxing match,” Pym said conversationally, but he was already shaking out his own bracelet and letting it fill with Light; the decided look upon his wife’s face was clear. Splitting up even further was unwise, but they could hardly leave Stark to a fate unknown. Moreover, they could not complete their goal without him in any case.

Van Dyne did not fly directly behind the column as Stark had done; rather, she went past it at a wide angle, bobbing up and down, and then returned to check by the same manner from the other side. Yet there was no sign of Stark; he had vanished into the Dark as neatly as though he had never been there. “I can see no trace,” she called, and bobbed closer to them; flying that far had stretched their bubble of shared Light to its very limits. “If it is the stone itself...”

“He could not _actually_ have been fool enough to try a spell upon it,” said Pym, paling.

Van Dyne’s expression was grim. “I will fly down and see.” If Stark had fallen... his flight spells were different from her own, but that sort of high-energy evocation usually required active concentration. But if they were... the damn fool of a man! It was not merely his own life he imperiled; the entirety of the Flying Cities were depending upon him. After all these years, he was still as reckless as a boy.

She blew her husband a kiss – Blake looked politely away while the tiny man on his shoulder returned the gesture – and then she was gone.

The two men remaining upon the ledge waited in tense silence as the seconds ticked by. Ten... twenty... Dr. Blake could not stop checking his watch, and nor could Pym, looking down from his shoulder. Thus it was that neither were looking up, and certainly not behind them, when a sudden, silent shape barreled into them from that direction; all they knew was that they were falling amid a great flapping of black wings, Pym’s tether the only thing keeping them tied together. Stone dropped away and left them entirely encircled by the Dark, with nothing to orient upon except gravity as they fell down, down into the abyss.

 

 

“Stark!” Van Dyne called again and again as she spiraled down about the column, searching on all sides for signs of the wayward High Wizard. “Stark!” At times, her voice echoed, and at times her call was met only with muted silence; there seemed to be no pattern to when and where.

The column wound down in its strange, ropey, poured manner, but occasionally a thin arc of stone branched up and away from it, climbing into the Dark; they would have been just wide enough for her to walk upon if she were full-sized. Yet there was no mark of Stark’s passage, and the lower she flew, the deeper her hopes sank. Where could he have gone? Why was he not calling back in kind? The Dark had not hidden his voice before; could it do so now?

Behind her, in unnatural silence, Blake and Pym fell past in a tangle of dark wings – outside of her bubble of Light, and therefore unseen.

A low hum was all the warning she had, and then a different bubble of Light collided with her own, the source of it rocketing past her – Stark, surrounded by incandescent spellfire and rising at speed, his fists clenched. He slowed himself immediately, flipping mid-air and re-orienting to the column, before they could be separated again; and the private thoughts that Van Dyne had been entertaining of also challenging him to a boxing match were at once swept away as she saw his expression. Beneath the red hues of the Darkwards his face looked grey with strain, and even worse from worry and grief. “I could not find them,” he said as soon as his head drew level with hers.

“What are you talking about?”

“Your husband – I am sorry.” He shook his head. “I threw out three flares on the column and the cavern floor, illuminated it in all directions – there but there no sign! I could not find them!”

“Hank and Blake are back upon the ledge,” said Van Dyne, bobbing in the air but otherwise giving no sign of her own inner fear. “I left them there to look for you!”

“What?” Stark was a picture of confusion. “But you called out – you said that Blake had slipped – ”

“I did no such thing,” Van Dyne said, and, “the echoes – ”

“Damn,” cursed Stark, and propelled himself upward; Van Dyne followed, her wings beating frantically to keep up with his evocation spells.

“Why under the blessed Sun did you go around the far side of the pillar in the first place?” she half shouted after him.

“I did not!” he protested, and then amended, “I did not on purpose – but when I glanced up from the stone, I saw nothing more than the Dark! I thought I must have drifted – yet when I went about, you still were not there – and then you called and there was no time to do anything but dive as swiftly as I could – ” he broke off. “I have never before been so disconcerted in this place. Damn it!”

“You have never been beneath the surface before,” Van Dyne reminded him, giving up and casting a tether upon his foot and letting his own spells drag her upward; their speed immediately increased, as he no longer had to compensate for her own limitations of speed. “Who knows any of what lies down here? The Dark came from below.”

“Yet here is where the anchor lies,” Stark muttered, just as the roof of the cavern came into view. His compass appeared again in his hand as Van Dyne released her tether, flying up to head height and then around the pillar. For a tense moment, they left the pillar behind them and there were no walls to orient themselves against; and then the downward-sloped ledge that she had left Blake standing upon came back into view. It was empty.

“They cannot have fallen,” she blurted. “Blake moved back from the ledge – he is not so foolhardy as you.”

“Perhaps they went further back up the tunnel.” Stark landed and his flight spell lines faded away; but as he climbed back upward there were no signs of the others.

“They would not have left us here alone.”

“We do not know that they had the choice,” said Stark. “Or perhaps they were tricked as well.”

“This is a farce,” said Van Dyne, clenching her fists. Her voice rose imperiously; she rose upward and away, raising her chin defiantly at the encroaching Darkness all around them. “You do not know who you challenge!” she proclaimed. “I am Lady Magistra Janet Van Dyne, and if you think me beaten, then think again! Toy with me, perhaps, but take my husband from me and I swear beneath the sun and stars, I will hunt you to the ends of the sky to reclaim him!”

“Oh,” cried a small, humming voice from behind them. Both whirled about: it had come from the direction of the pillar. “We ha’ nae taken nobody.” The speaker’s accent was thick and archaic, and contained an element of awkwardness; he or she – for the voice was of such a light, mid-range that it was impossible to determine – spoke haltingly, as if unfamiliar with the language. But with a moment’s thought the words were understandable enough; and both lord and lady mage were back in the air immediately, zooming toward the pillar.

Where before the pillar had seemed solid, now there was an opening in the side; and standing a little ways within was a creature that seemed straight out of a children’s storybook. It had no eyes within its face, but spotted markings that provided much the same aesthetics, and a large, bulbous nose; but the size of its nose was as nothing to its ears, which were each a full foot across. The creature itself stood no more than four feet tall; its skin was a grey colour, the exact same shade as the stone, and it was garbed in fine black cloth – no, leather, Van Dyne realized upon closer look; but so supple that she felt a deep pang of envy for their technique, even despite the far more pressing concerns.

“You... what are you?” asked Stark, defensive and offensive spells humming about and between his hands.

The creature’s ears swivelled toward them, as though it could track them through sound alone, and a wide grin broke out over its mouth. “I be Grommet, sir and ma’am, Stonemother of the Hoistwight Stonegnomes. And you are human!” Her dialect was far easier to parse upon a second try. “Flying humans! Though I had not thought you sort came so tiny.”

“A stonegnome,” breathed Van Dyne. Creatures other than humans – she had not believed in such things since she was a little girl. And yet here was one right in front of her, and –

Decorum. Stark was gaping next to her; he would be of no use. “Forgive me my challenge, then, madam,” Van Dyne said, making a mid-air curtsey. “I am Lady Magistra Van Dyne, and this is Lord High Wizard Anthony Stark – we are pleased to make your acquaintance, but our circumstances are not the best. We ventured down here with two others, and they have gone missing while we were distracted by echoes and shadows.”

“Ah, the shadesmir,” Grommet said, nodding knowingly. “Be those humans of your size, or his?”

“One of each.”

“Then they might have been beset by the bats,” said Grommet, concern wrinkling her face. “Have they weapons?” 

“Oh yes.”

“Ach, then I shall set my people to looking immediately,” said Grommet, and she let out a thin, high-pitched whistle that seemed to cut right through the oppressive Dark. The column around her shuddered and wavered, although she did not seem at all distressed by this, and a moment later each mage realized that it was not shuddering, but rather pulsing with magic – or a message. “Will ye come? The bats lair in the waste-caverns, not the crossbeams; but so many shadesmir flit here that of course we cannae keep the bats from hunting them. And if ye be turned about so easily by those wee creatures, why, perhaps you’d best stay in our company.”

“Madam, you are kind, but I must find Hank,” said Van Dyne. “He is my husband.”

“Aye, and we’ll find him all the quicker for you, ma’am; but we cannae fly as you humans may – humans! Rock and stone, of all the things to find today... – aye, well, if we do find him and have lost you to some wily shadesmir, why, that will solve naught at all.”

“It’s logical,” said Stark, glancing between them. “Van Dyne... I’m so sorry. This was my fault.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” snapped Van Dyne. “It was these... shadesmir. What are shadesmir? And what are bats?”

“Ye dinnae...” Grommet looked momentarily confounded. “Well, shadesmir be a part of the Dark, ma’am, as you humans call it – the Silence, it translates to in our language. I’ve always had a thing for odd tongues, you hear – though ne’er thought I’d speak to a native of this one! But nae, they be confusion made flesh; harmless, really, if ye know your way about; but should their games lead to a trap then they can be deadly indeed. The bats hunt them down, hear, which is why we be reluctant to drive the bats from our caverns, though o’ course they make fine leather.” She gestured at her coat proudly. “And for the bats – ” she screwed up her face in thought. “Shadesmir be a name from our tongue, but I had thought that bat would be a name from yours. It be a great flying creature – wings as wide as I am, or wider, and they hunt in packs.”

“Hank...” whispered Van Dyne.

“Dinnae worry. We hunt the bats often enough; we are old hands at it. We be getting him back for you soon.” The stone column rippled again, a pulse of magic surging up from below; both mages watched it warily, but Grommet merely patted the stone as though it were a dog. “And that be the huntsleader affirming it. We’ll find him. Will ye come down to wait? I think I should be an irresponsible Stonemother indeed, to leave ye here by yourselves.”

“I’ve never heard of bats or shadesmir,” said Stark. “Van Dyne, it is your decision to make.”

“Anthony Stark, setting aside responsibility?” she asked sharply, and Stark’s gaze snapped around to her, stung. “We will go with you, Grommet, and thank you kindly for the offer. We shall do our companions no good if we are led further astray.”

The stonegnome beamed at her, and beckoned them both toward the column as she retreated into its depths – what depths there were; at a closer look it seemed apparent that the column was not hollow throughout, but that Grommet was merely standing in a very small chamber. “Ach, good. I’d be fair worried else. Come, come; I shall lower us to below.”

Warily, they stepped into the small room within the column, although Stark had to hunch over quite a bit to fit – and then immediately both exclaimed as Grommet waved her hand and the roof obligingly shifted upward, the stone flowing instead to the opening to the outside and sealing it over. A moment later, and the room shifted; Stark, standing upon it, could feel it begin descending, although Van Dyne was left to determine this by wits alone. The ceiling descended with them; they were a bubble of air travelling through the stone column.

“I’ve never seen such effortless transmutation,” said Van Dyne admiringly.

“Ach, this? Well, we be stonegnomes; we and the stone have an agreement, so to speak,” chuckled Grommet. But there was something very sad about her. “And we have had a great deal o’ practice, these past months.”

“The cavern,” said Van Dyne.

And Stark, incredulously: “You built it. The entire thing?”

“Aye. And I be thinking that is why you are here now.”

“But it’s enormous,” said Van Dyne. “It’s – how large _is_ it?”

“Hhm... ach, as we measure such things...” Grommet frowned, ears twitching violently, and muttered to herself in her own tongue for a moment, scratching at her head. “I believe some hundreds of miles, as ye reckon it. Though much is not cavern, not anymore; all the stonegnomes of the undercontinent have been building it for months and months, you hear, and we do fill it much as we go, for we are nae certain yet of how much weight it must eventually bear. No, best to make it solid as can be. Hoistwight be responsible for but a small bit of it.”

“And you’re building it _up_ ,” said Stark, his eyes searching Grommet’s wrinkled face.

“Aye.”

“Up,” Stark repeated. “Of course! Oh, dear Light in heaven, the Cities are not sinking, the anchor has not moved – the very surface of the Earth has risen! You’re building _up_!” He froze, then, for a terrible thought had occurred to him. “ _Why?”_

“Ach, d’ye nae ken?” Grommet’s accent became stronger with distress. “But humans be less hardy than us stonegnomes; ye surely must make your own preparations. The Deeper Dark is rising, my friends, and we can do naught but flee before it.”

The stone floor shivered and stilled, and Grommet waggled thick fingers at a wall, which receded; there was a stone floor beyond. They had reached the floor of the cavern. Above them the weight of stone and the Dark pressed down, rendering their Lights small, pitiful things, as faint as fading hope.

 

 

 

The first shove was so violent that Pym barely had time to thank the stars for the tether; without it, as small as he was, he surely would have been knocked away from Blake. Then they were falling, and he was tumbling over in the air so quickly that nausea was soon upon him, made worse by the heavy smell of wet, dead things, the fetid odor of their attackers’ wings.

“JAN!” he shouted, but the Dark ate her name.

He tumbled over and over, unable to gain his bearings until a sharp jerk against the tether left him slammed into Blake’s chest: their fall had been arrested, and they were now being flown to one side. _Flown_ , because Pym could see that the creatures had claws set into Blake’s clothes and flesh; their wings were beating with the strain of keeping him in the air. They had no eyes, he saw with a shudder, but possessed great gaping mouths, and their wings were covered in fur instead of feathers. Blake himself was hanging limply in their grasp; had he knocked his head?

One, smaller than the massive creatures carrying Blake, darted in among the others and angled for him, mouth wide, teeth gleaming brightly in the Light from his bracelet; Pym threw himself into the opening of Blake’s coat, pulling the heavy cloth overtop of him, but even so the beast’s clawed feet scrabbled, tearing cloth and – Pym thought with a wince – Blake’s flesh. Desperately, he cast further spells of transmutation upon himself, summoning magical augmentations to his mind and senses that let him seek out insectisoid beings – but these creatures were something else; he could not control them as he could so easily control ants. He couldn’t even communicate with them.  

If he grew to a larger size he could swat the one menacing him out of the air; at even larger, he could swat them _all_ out of the air, but he could not chance growing any larger while they remained suspended above the floor of the cavern; if the creatures dropped them, they were done for.

No sooner had he thought this than came the sickening feeling of free-fall once again – but it was arrested before they had fallen more than a few feet, and from the complete lack of motion it was apparent that they had reached the ground – or something solid, in any case. Pym looked cautiously through a rent in the Blake’s jacket, and then, when he could see nothing, poked out his head and his wrist with its Lit bracelet as well; as the creatures had no eyes, it seemed an acceptable risk.

It was what his small attacker had been waiting for. The stench was all the warning he got before it was upon him, its jaw closing about his neck, and there was no time for even bracing himself; he grew to full-size in an instant, shuddering as the strain of the Darkwards doubled, trebled, and continued to weigh upon him; and, too, from the sudden gore that burst over his head: he had exploded the creature’s.

The other beasts flapped away; some had been gnawing at Blake’s flesh, Pym saw as he staggered to his feet. The poor doctor had a bloody head wound, and Pym could not determine its severity, but he was moving weakly still. “Get away from him!” Pym shouted, and the creatures all flinched back; the Dark had not eaten his voice this time, and their enormous, oversized ears could not withstand the sound.

But they did not give up; in an instant they were all around him, the smell making him gag, claws tearing at him – the Darkwards did not protect him from such physical things. Some had wingspans of four feet, or more; there was no help for it. This time, at least, he could brace himself for the strain as he grew again, to ten feet tall, then to fifteen; he swatted the creatures from the air with giant hands, sending them tumbling to break against stone walls, and bellowed, “ _BACK, YOU FOUL THINGS! AWAY!”_

They flapped, chittered, bit – and retreated, but not far enough; there were too many of them, far more than just the ones that had flown them here. He smacked a few more aside and stooped to pick up Blake, who was trying to climb to his own feet, one hand pressed against his head, covered in blood. The doctor fought him weakly.

“It’s me,” Pym said, trying to reassure him; he was not entirely certain of how reassuring he could be, but at least Blake ceased his struggling. They had to get out of here. Pym turned, pouring more effort into his Light spell until he could make out an opening to the smaller cave that they were in, and then he ran for it, gasping. A few opportunistic beasts followed them, but Pym beat them off again with his fists – and, to his surprise, even Blake managed to clobber one, clouting it soundly upon the head with his walking stick. He was astounded that the doctor had managed to hold onto it through their dizzying fall.

The tunnel of their exit went forward and ended in thin air – possibly the cavern, or possibly not, for Pym had no idea how Stark had managed such a radiant burst of Light. But the tunnel branched off other ways, as well. Was the whole underground one massive, labyrinthine complex of these tunnels? He picked one at random to follow, keeping careful note of which way they turned; when the sounds of the creatures were long gone, and no more had appeared behind them for a full minute, he set Blake down carefully against the wall and shrank back to tiny.

“Light above, what _were_ those things?” Blake asked after a moment. He’d pulled out a handkerchief and was now holding it firmly to his head wound, but he still looked a mess: blood all over his face and hair, made even redder by the glow of the Darkwards, and his other hand was clutching at his leg in a sign of obvious pain.

“I’ve never seen the like,” said Pym, letting the coolness of the stone sink into him. The adrenaline was beginning to fade, and he wanted nothing more than a cup of strong hot coffee, and Jan sitting beside him. “Such wings! But they had fur, not feathers. And such enormous ears – no eyes, of course. Those would be useless down here – but how do the ears play a role? We have already discovered how sound can also prove false – ”

“Your wife is a very capable lady,” rumbled Blake, and Pym clapped a hand over his own mouth to stop his torrent of words, shamefaced. “I have no doubt that if beset by such creatures, she would hold her own. And that is _if_.”

Pym nodded, and lowered his hand. “Yes,” he said, sounding rather calmer. “Of course. And she is much better at evocation than I am, too – she could claim a Mastery in it if she had the time. My apologies, doctor, I am out of sorts, and you are bleeding – are you badly injured?”

“Not terribly so,” said Blake, but it was not entirely clear how honest he was being. “A mild concussion, I think, but the dizziness already fades; take no notice of the blood. Head wounds always bleed quite out of proportion to their severity.” He prodded gingerly at his scalp, where the flow of blood had dwindled to a mere trickle, and then carefully nodded.

“But your leg...”

“Ah...” Blake shifted it, experimentally, and sweat broke out upon his brow. “Strained, yes, but with some wrapping I... believe it will hold weight – or at least, as much weight as it has ever held.”

Blake had half the supplies, of course; it was simple enough for Pym to enlarge a blanket, and a knife to cut it into strips. But even after the doctor had wrapped his leg tightly, he could not stand without liberal use of the wall; and he rested no weight upon his bad leg at all.

Pym grimaced, and then looked away in attempt to hide it; for all that he had thought (and still thought) Blake’s presence folly, the doctor was here now and naught could be done except to continue. But Blake would not make it far walking, and in any event, remaining at his own small size would leave them vulnerable again to the creatures, whatever they were; growing to giant-size would use up his magical reserve a great deal faster, but they were at dire straits now. So it was that he stood up, and grew up as he did so, until he was eight feet tall and could easily support most of Blake’s weight for him.

“Stark will no doubt fire off more of those flares of his, once Jan finds him,” said Pym, trying to be optimistic – although he could not bring himself to be so charitable as to be willing to use Stark’s familiar name. He was too thoroughly angry at the man. “If we’re near to the opening, they’ll see us.”

“And I have a full half the supplies, if not,” said Blake. Much to his credit, the strain upon him was only barely audible in his voice. “We have naught to worry about, except those devilish creatures.”

“If we are here for some time, I might make a study of them,” Pym said, brightening, and his wholly genuine demeanor in this statement earned a chuckle from Blake.

“Aye, my friend, you might. Why, take a few specimens back to the University, and you’d be the talk of New York for the next year! Perhaps you could work how they fly – I cannot fathom it.”

“Oh, for flight you must ask Jan; but you are a doctor, and better versed in anatomy. We three ought make a study of it together,” said Pym generously.

“I shall look forward to it,” Blake promised, as the tunnel mouth came into view; beyond lay the massive, artificial cave, a black hole. They were likely a great deal nearer to its floor, of course, and both men leaned forward hopefully so that Pym might shine his bracelet as close as possible; but they could see nothing except the steep wall. It might have been thirty feet down or three hundred; or more than that. They could not see the ceiling, either, but unless the sickening sensation of free-fall had confused his mind utterly, Pym was convinced that they had a great distance. 

 “If the walls were not so blasted sheer, we might climb out. We’ve enough rope for it,” Pym said, looking up critically in a way that made Blake shuffle uneasily backwards from the ledge; and ever-mindful of his nearness by the Darkwards, Pym followed, though not without an irritated look. “Ah, you remind me. I had thought perhaps to suggest a belay system – I should go ahead and transmute small hand-holds – but we should have to have less than ten feet of slack. Slow-going.”

“Might we not climb down, instead?” asked Blake. “That is our purpose in coming here, after all.”

“True,” said Pym, but it was obvious from the way he gnawed at his upper lip that he was not at all in favour of the plan.

“Surely, they shall be looking, and as likely to see us down there as up,” Blake said reasonably. “More so, even; for down is easier than up for us to reach.”

Pym acceded. “You are quite right. And I suppose it is no guarantee that we should reach them up there – we were carried quite a distance by those beasts. No, you are entirely right. But we _should_ mark where we have been.”

They spent the next short while sorting through the various strings tied to Blake’s vest, Pym alternatively enlarging them into rope and their toy trinkets into usable items, before realizing he had the wrong string and re-shrinking them; but at last Pym stumbled upon the barrel of rather unusual chemicals that Stark had insisted upon packing: a mix of lime, a phosphorescent agent, and a highly toxic purple compound that Pym had to ward both himself and Blake against before they could crack the seal. But with a brush it made for a bright pink paint that did not shrivel or blacken even when it left the protection of Pym’s Darkwards, and so they painted a line about the tunnel entrance, an enormous arrow pointing downward, and then – after Pym had shrunk the brush to a more suitable size – a message describing their plan.

“This is, of course, assuming we _can_ get down,” said Pym. The thick, ooze-like nature of the rock did not produce natural hand-holds that could be seen from the mouth of the tunnel. Nor was there anything at the top to tie a rope about – which would not have worked in any case; Pym could not extend the Darkwards out to shield thirty feet of rope, and their little bubble of Light showed that the floor was further away than that.

Blake said nothing for a moment, mastering even the urge to raise an eyebrow; and if he had any thoughts about suggesting that Pym was acting rather dense for a man with three Masteries, then he restrained them in the face of Pym’s worry for his wife, and instead merely suggested, “Could you not transmute the rope into the rock? Fuse it to the face of the wall?”

“Perhaps, but fabric is really more Jan’s area... I should not like to compromise the tensile strength of the rope...” Pym trailed off, obviously considering it and just as obviously hesitating. “Of course, you would have to climb; I would need to be small. Supporting all these spells at once... well, we’ve not all of us Stark’s Dweomer-strength, I’m afraid.” His laugh was very short.

“If need be, I can bear it,” said Blake with grim resolution. “But if you think you must be small, then we should go now, whilst those creatures are still feeling the fright you gave them; the longer we leave them alone, the less they shall remember it, and the bolder they shall become.”

He looked ghastly pale beneath the Darkwards, but Pym could not fault his logic, nor his courage. Nor could he deny his own wish to be doing _something_ , and preferably something that would take them far away from the beasts, even if it went against all his unreasonable heart to go _down_ instead of _up,_ forward instead of backtracking, and hope that their paths once again merged with Jan’s; but there was no way to ensure the former, and the latter was by far their best chance. Pym shook his head, once, inwardly crying out against his panicky heart, which left him bereft of cold logic in the times he needed it most, and full of resolve not to resent Blake’s own fortunate collectedness too much. The man was a doctor, after all. “Right, then. Let’s get on with it.” There was no sound of the creatures – but there had not been on their first approach, either.

Pym grew stone up and around the end of one of their former strings, and then as he lay collapsed upon Blake’s shoulder, panting, the doctor fastened the other end around himself with a clever series of knots that allowed him to slip slack through when his hand was upon the rope and yet would immediately cinch tight without that controlling pressure. Pym watched him with some curiosity, and sensing this, Blake said, “At first I had so few skills that would allow me to make my way in the world; but though my leg was weak, my arms were strong. I took work building the wall about New York – then New Orleans. It involved a great deal of dangling from ropes like these.” He smiled. “I’d thought I’d forgotten how to tie such knots, but the fingers remember.”

“But have no memory of what they did before?” Pym asked; a question that might have been edged, but his tone held only a Magistar’s curiosity.

“None.” Blake shook his head. “Not for want of looking; I have had more careers than most men would in twenty lifetimes, yet while I have found at least moderate success in most, none sung to me with any familiarity. Medicine has been my great passion, these past two decades, but it is a new love, not an old one rediscovered.” He was not looking at the knots in his hands; his gaze was focused on something much further away. “But I am truly sorry that my attempt at self-discovery has hindered this quest, Pym, prophetic dreams or not.”

Pym shifted uncomfortably, his own, deeply inner accusations seeming ill-natured and selfish in the face of the doctor’s regret, and by that realization being lessened; he had, after all, saved the doctor’s life, and in that light it was easier to be magnanimous, especially with effort now being directly made to reunite with Jan. “You may as well call me Henry,” he offered, “since you are carrying me about on your shoulder; we are by far familiar enough for that.”

Blake’s face split in a grin, one that seemed to make the Light shine more brightly from Henry’s bracelet. “Aye, you have the right of it there,” he agreed. “But you must call me Donald, in return – and now,” he swung his feet over the edge of the drop, “we must make this descent.”

Extending the Darkwards to cover ten feet of rope had Henry biting his lip; at fifteen feet, he was sweating from the effort; and by the time Donald had belayed them down twenty feet, he was barely able to set aside the strain to coax a new anchor from the stone before dropping the extended wards. As he allowed himself to recover, Donald kept an eye upon the rope still tied above; before Henry had collected himself for the next stage, the Dark had already rotted it through, so that a large chunk of it fell soundlessly into the void below.

“If I didn’t know Anthony must have used the Dweomer to power it, I’d think him inhuman for dropping a rope down through a good mile of this,” Henry gasped. “This shall not work; it is proportional to some power of the distance. We shall have to pause every ten, or I shall burn through my reserves far too quickly.”

“More frequent stonework will not overtax you?”

“Oh, it shall,” Henry coughed, “but we shall just have to hang about for a bit, Donald.” He sighed. “It is just as well we are not trying to go up!”

It was slow going, indeed, each ten feet laboriously won as Henry coaxed a firm anchor from the rock, and by the time they had made fifteen such drops and rests, Donald was forced to rub at his leg discreetly; muscle memory or no, his body was perhaps not _exactly_ the same as it had been eighty years ago, and his rope harness wasn’t good enough to keep his legs from slowly going numb. He flexed and extended his legs carefully, slowly, and said no word; Henry was undoubtedly working as quickly as he safely could.

But before they could go any further than that, the stone wall that Donald was pressed against _rolled_ , as slightly as the faintest wave on a calm pond, and for a brief, heart-stopping moment, the stone about their anchor trembled. The rope slipped, gravity acting immediately against them – and then the rope was swallowed completely, the rock roiling about them, a silent creature suddenly come to life: it devoured them, and neither Donald nor Henry could breathe; there was nothing but stone, crushingly powerful as it consumed them... and then, apparently finding them not to its taste, spat them back out.

They both hit a horizontal surface – made of more stone – and Donald immediately fell over, off-balance; Henry swung out on his tether and had to quickly elongate it, then dive out of the way to avoid getting fallen upon.

Henry thrust power that he couldn’t truly spare into the bracelet, and the Light flared as Donald struggled back upward to one knee, the lengthened tether dragging Henry upward as well and swinging him backward to smack into Donald’s broad chest – a small impact from Donald’s point of view, but it knocked the wind out of the Magistar. The brief rush of Light was enough to place their immediate surrounds within a larger context, however, so Henry considered it effort well-spent, even if he was left blinded for a few moments following the burst.

They were within yet another Darkness-damned cave, one that Henry found to be far too small for even his tastes considering what _else_ was in the cave with them. A collection of six _things_ were standing but a few yards away – _standing_ , because unlike the earlier creatures, these at least weren’t winged; they stood upright as did humans. But there were all too few similarities past that. They were squat, broad, and horrifying. Bulbous noses extended outward past over-wide mouths, taking up so much space on the creatures’ faces that Henry wasn’t surprised – repulsed, but not surprised – to realize that like the bats, these things had no eyes. They did have the same black hides, though, and the same type of enormous, leathery ears sprouting from their heads like overgrown mushrooms.

And they were standing in front of the cave’s only exit, because, as both Henry and Donald discovered when they glanced backward, the wall behind them had sealed shut.

Henry didn’t waste any further time. He dropped the tether, but grew before he had time to fall anywhere, attaining ten feet with a speed that left him dizzy. This type of transmutation was still possible, at least – solely upon himself, protected by the Darkwards as he was. But if the creatures standing in front of them had caused the stone to twist and meld like that... a part of his mind was weighing the possibilities, and he found nothing he liked. Either the stone had just _done_ that, or the creatures had done it, or something _else_ had done it. None of the possibilities said good things for Donald and him. He began to lumber forward – and a small hand grabbed at his wrist.

“My friend, wait!” cried Donald.

Henry paused – somewhat slowly, for having set his now-enormous bulk in motion, it was impossible to bring it to a halt as quickly as a smaller man might. Yet he did pause, although fear gathered in his heart as he did; and yet the monstrous things that had dropped them here did not advance at this sign of weakness. They quailed backward instead, their ears twitching furiously as they emitted the occasional grunts – which covered a truly impressive range of octaves, some portion of Henry’s mage-trained mind noted. True, his speciality was _insects_ , but...

“They do not seek our blood,” Donald said firmly. Despite the ludicrous nature of his hand upon Henry’s arm – at their present sizes there was absolutely nothing Donald could have done to physically prevent Henry from moving – it was a potent restraint nonetheless. “And while I have no objection to defending ourselves, I am a _doctor_ , Henry.”

“And they seem to have no trouble causing bruises,” snapped Henry, not taking his eyes off the creatures. And yet...

...it was impossible that they could actually be more than mere monsters. _Impossible_. Even before the Rising, mages had long known that fairy-tales of intelligent beings other than humans were just that: children’s tales, told to them by nurses and parents seeking to either encourage imagination or curb misbehaviour, depending on the tale. ..

... and yet the creatures did seem to be... _gesturing_ , with large, expansive movements – why? They could hardly see them in any case, unless they had eyes hidden somewhere else, _or_ some other way of seeing that was as strange to him as vision would be to these creatures – and yet that paled beside the realization that the creatures were communicating. _Intricately_. True, the communication of ants was intricate and delicate – but in learning to read _that_ , Henry had long since come to realize that human language, human gesture, was ten thousand times as complex. And yet to his well-trained eye, these creatures were communicating in such a manner as might actually be... similar.

One of the creatures stepped forward; the others, their postures tense, remained behind. And a bit closer to the Light, now, Henry realized that the black hides covering most of their bodies were not, in fact, _their_ hides; they were clothes. The beings’ spokesperson opened its mouth and made a few slow, painstaking sounds.

Henry stared at it, hard. Those sounds – was it trying to talk to them? Did it realize that they couldn’t speak its language?

“Light!” said Donald. “They speak _English?_ ”

Henry, dumbfounded, took his eyes off of the creatures long enough to turn and blink at him. When he turned back, the creature repeated the words – and this time, not over-thinking the situation, not expecting the words to be _foreign_ , Henry’s brain made the connection. The words were off-pitch, the vowels and consonants mangled (much as he’d mangled Old Latin in his youth), and they were pronounced with the slowness of someone who wouldn’t get very far even with a dictionary in hand – but they were, ever so barely, intelligible.

“You. We. Walk.”

One of the other creatures called encouragement – a strange thing; part of their language seemed to be largely non-vocal, and other parts so high-pitched that it hurt Henry’s ears. The spokescreature hummed at its companion, then turned back and added, with some difficulty about the ‘r’, “Friend.”  

“And they’re friendly,” said Donald admiringly.

“They speak _English,_ ” hissed Henry, his own brain perhaps still a few seconds behind. “They – they must _live_ here, somehow. Jan – oh, Light, they have to help us find her!”

Perhaps the creature was impatient with this discussion, for it tapped its own shoulder and repeated, “Friend.” Then, it tapped its nearest companion, repeating the word – and its next nearest, and its next nearest. But before either human could begin to think it simple-minded, it ceased, looking back at them – inasmuch as a being without eyes could look.

“They know!” said Henry. He took a generous step forward – too generous for Donald, who overbalanced and nearly fell – he would have fallen, in fact, but for a pillar of stone that rose smoothly from the floor and became a stand for him to grab. The spokescreature ventured forward in obvious concern, bending over to examine his leg with its eyeless face. Its overlarge ears flapped nervously.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” said Henry, clapping a hand to his head. “Damn – ”

“It’s of no moment,” said Donald, although his face had whitened anew with pain. “We need to follow them. Walk,” he said to the spokescreature.

This elicited a clamor. Hope rose among all parties. The spokescreature made a sound not unlike a sigh, and more rock rose from the ground, with an ease that Henry envied – and formed itself into a low-slung seat positioned for Donald to easily sit upon. The creature patted it. “Walk.”

“That’s not walking,” Donald observed.

“They must be masters of transmutation... this should be interesting.” Henry’s tone, however, betrayed a lack of true interest; his focus now was upon one objective only.

The creatures were most solicitous in seeing – so to speak – Donald seated; they seemed to sense his every suppressed wince or flinch, their ears quivering. They had some medical knowledge, too; as soon as he was seated, the chair gently raised a footrest, until Donald’s injured limb could be elevated above his heart. Then they were off, the creatures trotting and the chair following, gliding along the floor so smoothly that the sight of closed walls passing around them was almost nauseating.

The tunnels almost immediately shortened, until they were little taller than their new allies; were Donald attempt to stand now, he would have needed to keep his knees bent and his shoulders stooped down. Each tunnel was built with the same smooth flow of rock as the much larger tunnel above – but this, combined with the impossible motion of the chair, only added to the sense of nausea that Donald experienced. He pressed his face against the cool stone of his chair and swallowed. Henry, tiny again and perched upon Donald’s shoulder with a Light brightly shining, was immune to physical nausea by the much greater emotional roil within his soul; he noted the similarity, but made no comment. The wondrous transmutation powers of their hosts were a concern far distant to the location of his beloved.

Their hosts obviously knew where they were going; their progress was entirely without pause, even when the tunnel occasionally branched, right up until they stopped completely. Donald attempted to lever himself up from the reclined chair, to see what was about, but before he could do so all of the creatures clustered about them – and then they were dropping, sickeningly, _down_ , the Light cut off and the Dark pressing in as stone surrounded them, pulling them through and into a vast cavern.

Henry’s Light flared again, perhaps out of nerves, and reflected back dozens of startled, eyeless faces, large ears twitching frantically. The silence of the Dark was no more; there were enough of these creatures that their conversations echoed about in a bewildering but reassuring backdrop of sound. Each had its own business, here – except for a cluster of much smaller creatures that came sliding up on a wave of stone, chittering curiously at the humans in high-pitched voices until the adults shooed them away.

“Light above,” said Donald, as their escort continued with them through the cavern. The bubble of Henry’s light illuminated creatures at various tasks – sewing at strange hides, stirring stone cauldrons that glowed red with heat and gave off steam, and one large group of adults clustered around – _something_ , Donald couldn’t see before they had passed, but he could feel the shivery sense of magic radiating from them nonetheless, the same way he felt as his chair whisked them forward. “They have an entire city down here.”

They passed into another tunnel, then, and continued further down in a right-ward spiral. There was another, mercifully brief passage through the stone, and then they dropped into a much smaller cavern – one already Illuminated.

“ _Hank!_ Oh, thank the Light!” Van Dyne caught up her husband in a flying tackle of a hug. Stark was hard on her heels – although he had remained with his feet upon the ground – and he clapped Donald on the shoulder, a swift, relieved gesture that also allowed him to smoothly take over the effort of supporting the Darkwards upon Donald - so smoothly, in fact, that the only reason the doctor could tell was the dark red rope of magic flickering into existence between them as he withdrew his hand.

Henry, on the other hand, quite obviously felt the release rather better; he collapsed into his wife’s embrace with a pitiful groan, one that made Donald peer closely at him in concern – and thus realize that perhaps the man was made limp less by the sudden lifting of the magical weight than by the lifting of his worry about his wife.

“Oh, you’re hurt!” Van Dyne cried, fluttering back to Donald’s shoulder and setting them both down upon it. They were tiny enough that Donald could hardly feel their weight.

“It’s not much, Donald’s much worse off than me,” said Henry.

Much to his dismay, Donald was forced to admit that this was true. He was not certain that if he tried to stand from his chair, he’d be able to keep his feet, cane or no.  

“Ach, so he is,” said an unfamiliar voice – with an accent that rung some ancient bell in Donald’s mind. That was more English, sure enough – and yet... it was not the accent that he had known when he had awoken in a strange place with no memories; it was thicker than that, with more sound packed into each syllable than there should be, to a point where he doubted he could ever have mimicked it. Neither was it the accent of modern citizens. Nonetheless, there was something naggingly familiar about it. Had he heard it before?

 “Come, come, let me good wife have a look at it,” the new speaker – yet another of the beings, with even larger ears than the others, if that were possible. Like them, it – _he_ , both Henry and Donald immediately assumed by the tenor of his voice – was eyeless, but now that strangely bereft forehead wrinkled in thought. “Or perhaps not. I see ye’ve bandaged yourself up quite finely, and although I’d say we’ve a few medicines we could try, it may not be best considering ye be a human.”

“Henry, Doctor Blake, may I present Grommet Stonemother, the reason for your swift rescue by the stonegnomes here? Madam,” Stark had turned to the being – the ‘stonegnome’ – who had spoken such old English, and now said with a bow, “Madam, these are indeed our lost companions, and we are in your debt for reuniting us so swiftly.”

“’Tis nothing, nothing.” Grommet shook her head, lower earlobes flapping. “Aye, we’d’ve done the same for any of our own – although no doubt they’d not be so lost in the first place! But it be within my responsibilities as Stonemother to remember humans, even if I’d not thought I’d ever get the chance to speak with one of ye in the flesh.”

“But how is it you _do_ speak English?” Henry asked from Donald’s shoulder. Husband and wife were still clinging to each others’ hands tightly, but now both of their tiny faces had turned back toward Grommet – Van Dyne’s, like Stark’s, lacking the desperate curiosity writ all across Henry’s. No doubt, if they had been in the company of the stonegnomes for the entire hour it had taken Henry and Donald to be guided here, then they had already had some of their most urgent questions answered.

“Ach, their lord- and ladyship here have already explained that ye do not know, but I cannot say it’s not still surprising to me,” said Grommet. “Let us set your chair down here, first. If we cannot give ye any healer’s medicine, then at least we can give ye ice stones numb the edge of the pain.”

“That would be _most_ welcome,” said Donald sincerely.  

 

 

“For as long as memory has served us – and we have somewhat longer memories than your own, methinks – we stonegnomes built up as rapidly as we could. We live in the Greydark, as the Paladin described it in your tongue, and though the foolhardy among us may venture down into the Middledark, tha’ which dwells there is no friend o’ ours. Oh, the Greydark has its dangers – there are the shadesmir, as ye’ve heard, and the bats as well; despite our best efforts there are at times cave-ins and collapses. At times too there are the great – ” here,  Grommet’s explanation broke off as she said a word that didn’t entirely fall within the range of human hearing, and elicited both winces and expressions of confusion for the four members of the company.

“Oh, well, they be... fog demons, I think, comes close,” Grommet offered up as a translation. “And I won’t pretend they are not more dangerous than anything else down here! But for the past, ah,” her brow wrinkled as she obviously performed the mental conversion, “hundred years or so, even they’ve not bothered us – they be more drawn to certain of the old human ruins these days, and if we know not why then at least we know we can avoid them. Nay, for the terrible price we know ye paid,” and Grommet’s voice conveyed far more compassion than her alien face could manage to show to the four, “the entire race of stonegnomes is in your debt, for we have prospered these past hundred years.”

Stark and Van Dyne had heard this before, but Henry and Donald leaned in, utterly enthralled despite their exhaustion and hurts – although these had been mitigated by a swiftly-brewed pot of coffee and a far more thorough application of the contents of Donald’s medical kit, and in Henry’s case, his wife’s mere presence. Stark, in turn, had taken advantage of the rest to have pull a crystal from a pocket and run divinatory spells through it – a task he had been at before they were all reunited, and which gave him no better results than it had then. But now he looked up from paper upon which he’d been scrawling notes and, at Grommet’s gesture, took over the explanation.

“We all know the Rising was a century ago, but I think that has perhaps too much overshadowed what schoolchildren are taught of history; it wasn’t the _only_ thing going on a hundred years ago. Or perhaps,” his dark blue eyes were grave, “I should say that the Rising was merely the end-sequence in a series of equally important events. I had all of Howard I’s surviving notes to look at, but even I didn’t know exactly what had occurred until Grommet’s explanation.” He grimaced. “Too little _has_ survived. But I think I have put the pieces together correctly now.”

“Or perhaps you’re still too invested in adolescent dreams of becoming a Paladin,” Van Dyne said dryly. It was not true skepticism, however, merely levity.

“Hah!” Stark’s laugh was slightly forced. “But come, Donald, perhaps you know better, having lived with those who themselves experienced that history. For I think now that the Rising did not interrupt the Second Chaos War – it was _caused_ by it. Specifically, by one of those madmen of the Axis so feared within the Allied States – the Necromancer, Arnim Zola.”

Donald was not the only one who shivered at the name. Perhaps much of what had occurred during the Second Chaos War had been lost, the good doctor thought, yet the name of Zola was still known throughout the Cities, as was the name of the Paladin who had so determinedly opposed him. The fate of both Zola and Sir Steven Rogers – Captain of the Paladins, and as they were worn away by Zola’s onslaught of obscene dark arts, the Last Paladin of them all – were given over to legend, but _legend_ they had become: creatures of fairy tales, all the more haunting for the knowledge that they had been real. The citizens of the Flying Cities determinedly ignored the sea of the Dark below their floating havens, but the tales of its deadliness were all too true; and in the same way old stories about the Necromancer Zola, who had stolen the souls of a million innocents, could not be entirely discounted.

Yet the thought that one man, no matter how terrible, could be responsible for the Darkness itself was too much for Donald to fully credence, and Henry opposed his wife in her lack of skepticism – perhaps unwisely, considering that she had no doubt heard the full explanation, such as Stark had had time to come to, and most likely contributed to it herself.  

“You discount it.” Stark smiled grimly. “Of course you do. How could any one man have that power?” He paused – a bleak silence – before adding softly, “How could any one man lift ten billion tonnes of rock miles into the sky?”

“You think he had something like the Dweomer,” said Henry.

“I’m dead certain of it.”

It was Hank’s turn to shake his head, a tiny motion that Donald could barely see from the corner of his eye. “Anthony, lifting the Cities is one thing – one nearly impossible thing, I’ll grant you – but the Dark is of an entirely different order of magnitude! You yourself surveyed it with your mad pilot Rhodes, and reported back to the University that the Dark stretched around the circumference of the Earth without break or gap. And for that matter, the good Stonemother here has just said that her stonegnomes have lived in the Greydark for time out of memory. I’m sure Zola was a great many things, but even if you are thinking he was immortal and created the Dark in the bowels of the Earth at the dawn of time, I find it doubtful it just _happened_ to bubble over at the end of the Second Chaos War.”

“Why not?” asked Stark. “It was the most horrific war in history – it saw the invention of weapons to destroy towns, then cities, then nations... the destruction of the Earth itself would have been the natural progression. Yet you mishear me, Henry; I never said that Zola caused the Dark. I said he caused the _Rising_. And for you to believe that, perhaps I should let Grommet explain the rest of her people’s history.” 

“Well, what there is of it,” Grommet said with a gesture that conveyed the uncertainty of a shrug, if not the motion of it. “Ah, we have long memories, but poor histories – or so we did, until a hundred years ago. For it were known for the longest time that should a stonegnome community fail to move, oh, at least twenty yards upward a day, why, then we should never keep ahead of the Middledark – and what lies beneath _that_.” She shivered. “We were a poor folk, then, and there were not so many of us – my own father told me that even the bats were a serious threat in those days. Hand to mouth, it was, not much time to be building grand cities like we have now, nor such large caverns to keep them in, aye. But that changed a hundred years ago. My clan were building upward, as we always had – extending the stone beyond the surface of the earth – and then, all a sudden, the surface... it was not the same plain surface as we’d always seen. We’d broken through to some truer surface, perhaps – the surface world upon which ye humans lived.” She shook his head. “Not a pretty happening, my father told me; for your kind was not made to live in even the gentle Greydark, and we were not made to live without it.”

“More to the point, your father was two hundred years old at the time,” said Stark, obviously having learned this earlier.

“Aye,” agreed Grommet.

“Twenty yards a day, for five generations so long-lived as that, would have them starting on the other side of the Earth and working _inward_ ,” said Stark. “The Earth, as a sphere, is simply not large enough.”

“He is right in this,” Van Dyne said, and when the remaining two members of their company looked over at her, she tilted her head in a far more elegant gesture than a shrug could ever be – even Grommet’s version of it. “No, I am yet unconvinced by _all_ your conclusions, Stark, but you must admit that the ones I disagree with are based firmly in speculation. This part is numbers: and mathematics does not lie. As Stark says,” she turned now to her husband and Donald, “the Earth is not large enough. No, from Grommet’s description, I think we must accept that it was not a surface that they breached, but a _portal_ between two worlds.”

“Aye, if ye wish to call it that,” said Grommet. “And truth, it were more like a door – for only in the one place did _up_ lead to such a strange realm, and we could build overtop if we so chose. Yet after the Shield went up, why, that was the last thing on our minds. We sent out all the messages we could before the Deeper Dark came too near beneath, and pulled as many of our clans to the surface as we could, which was pitifully few compared to what we have now. The Shield prevented the Dark from rising further, you see, and for the first time in memory, our people could settle and have children without fear.”

“The Shield?” asked Henry.

“Aye,” said Grommet, and for all the wonder in her voice there was sadness, too. “T’were the Paladin who created it. We understand ye humans cannot move rock and stone like us – that much we learned from that one’s great-grandfather,” she nodded at Stark, “and other such pool souls as braved the Greydark even when they could not properly breathe its air. That was how we came to learn your tongue, you see – or, well, the quickest among us did, and it’s been taught to those with the inclination since, although there’s not many of us in these late days. But I go down a side-tunnel. Nay, you humans do not move the stone itself, but ye’ve many other wondrous magics about you, and it were Sir Steven Rogers who blocked the tunnel leading back to the Deeper Dark. We know not how; but in the days before the Dark began rising again, any who might brave the edge of the Middledark would go and leave grave gifts upon it; for his body yet lies in the air betwixt this surface and that deepness, guarding us still, even if his soul has passed on long since.”

For a moment, there was silence, the same hushed, oppressive silence as filled the rest of the Dark that the company had been so far; and Donald was not the only one who wondered that Grommet could be so certain that her clan still lived at all times, with that blanketing hush ready to smother any certainty of such a thing. But Henry’s mind, on the other hand, worked in a different direction, as was evidenced by the way he shortly said, “The Paladin’s Sacrifice.”

“Exactly,” said Stark.

“I beg your pardon?” asked Grommet politely.

“We have no more Paladins yet living,” explained Van Dyne. “They all fell during the Second Chaos War – according to legend.” Her lips quirked. “According to that same legend, though, such worthy men and women as they could break the bounds of presently-known magic when they chose, using it to heal, to reveal the truth – all sorts of remarkable things. And in truly desperate times, when all other hope was lost, they could call down a miracle from heaven itself – at the cost of their own lives.”

“I never truly thought it could be real,” murmured Henry. “All their powers sound so far-fetched as to be witchery, charlatanism. They were all pagans, anyway.”

“All were, in those times,” Donald spoke up for the first time in quite a while. His knee had settled into a comfortable ache, although he knew it would be the Blackest Dark to be walking on tomorrow. For now, however, he could be content – if it were not for all the reminders. “The change of the faith after the Rising was... tumultuous. Five, ten, fifteen years after – those were not happy times. I think, if any Paladin had survived, the old gods would not have been rejected so thoroughly. But it pressed upon the people hard, when they faced death and disease and no longer could turn to a Paladin for aid.” The memory of that hard time returned to him too easily, down here – and he did not even know what had happened in those very first years. It must have been a truly desperate scrabble.

“And specifically,” said Stark, with a careful edge in his voice that Donald found himself immensely disliking, “Howard’s notes are very clear that Captain Rogers’ last, self-appointed mission was to perform the Sacrifice.” His face was very neutral – very controlled. Too much so, for a lord so great and familiar with the games of nobles as he. “For most of my life I’d thought that he used it to provide the Cities’ with their initial lift, actually. But apparently not.”

“ _Ah,_ ” breathed Van Dyne, and Donald leaned aside far enough that he could properly give her a sharp glance. It told him nothing: her expression had smoothed out to that noble’s mask as well.

Henry’s, on the other hand, was easily read; and he had no qualms about speaking his thoughts aloud. “You never mentioned that at the time,” he said indignantly. “What if _that_ is in the formation of the anchor’s wards?”

“A bridge to be crossed when we came to it, I fear,” Stark said, and his mask broke – or, rather, reformed into a better mask; now he smiled, and it looked natural upon him. “I’ve not yet seen it myself, after all; and from Grommet’s history, it does appear that I was wrong in my earlier supposition. The Necromancer – or if not the Necromancer, then some other dark magician of the Axis – broke open a portal to an even darker world, and thus it poured forth. Sir Rogers’ Sacrificed his life to shield that gap, and so it did not _continue_ pouring forth – until now.”

“We know not why the Captain’s Shield be breaking, but breaking it is,” Grommet agreed. “Or it must be.”

Van Dyne was thoughtful. “It has been a hundred years, after all – and this began near the winter solstice?” She looked at Stark for confirmation that she undoubtedly did not truly need. “Large magical rites have time limits, as well you know. Perhaps even the mystical powers of a Paladin do, too.”

Both the other mages present bowed their heads in acknowledgement of her point. “None of us are paladins,” said Henry heavily. “And their abilities have not been duplicated by mages in a hundred years of searching.”

“But perhaps we can strengthen it, if his shield is merely failing, and not yet fallen,” said Stark – but there was a cryptic air to his words, swiftly hidden. Donald noted it carefully. “I think we must have a look at it, however. The anchor, as well – doubtless its wards shall need reinforcing against this renewed Darkness.”

“Ye will be killed if ye go down there,” said Grommet with authority.

“Lady, we thank you for your fortuitous rescue; but we are magistrars of the University, and when armed with knowledge we are a fearsome force,” Van Dyne said, authority ringing in her voice. Donald did not even think it was purposeful; it was simply how the Lady was, used to a mastery of her surroundings... as Donald was not. But she then turned a brilliant smile upon him. “And if we are wounded, then we have a well-experienced doctor, sailor, and all-round adventurer here to patch us up. We must attempt the Middledark; we cannot fail the cities. We’d be well served to know what dangers we might face.”

Grommet tugged on one of her ears unhappily. “We cannae get within a hundred yards deep of it anymore – t’is too deep for us now. Not as we’ve had time to be doing any explorin’. Ah, there’d probably be a few young sots with more bravery than sense who’re still raring to go exploring down there,” she admitted. “And after the hundred years of peace the Paladin gave us, it’d not be upon my heart to ban them from going. But ye are hardly built for it, I must say, although at least ye seem to not be poisoned by the very air itself as your kind once were.”

“We’ve learned a lot about magic in the past hundred years,” said Henry.

“Perhaps,” said Grommet, but she still sounded doubtful. “Well, there be Fog Demons in greater numbers, o’ course – though if ye be with a few good stonegnomes, we can usually put more stone between us than such can eat through, even if we be exhausted by the time the chase is done. But be caught unawares and it will have the flesh off your bones in an instant, make no mistake,” she warned.

“The Darkwards should help against that,” said Stark.

“ _Should_ ,” emphasized Van Dyne. “I’d not like to find out the hard way! Even you didn’t jump into the Dark all in one go when you were developing the Darkwards, Stark. Avoiding the creatures would certainly be best.”

“I didn’t suggest otherwise.”

“Hrmph,” said Grommet. “As I said, they be the ones we can run from, along with such things as giant insects and the Deepbats. ‘Tis the Walkers that we cannot flee.” Her voice – which all of the company had come to realize was the most expressive they’d ever heard, and in the case of Van Dyne and Stark, they had spent their youths attending the most grandiose operas New York could produce – was now flat, so much so that the Light shining from Stark’s bracelet seemed to dim.

“The trick o’ them is to not notice ‘em,” said Grommet, her voice still hushed and flat. “Think o’ them, and they shall be upon you. If they are there, you cannot let yourself hear them, ye cannot smell them, or you are dead. Think naught of them; think of _something else_. They are in the stone as they are in the air. If you’ve the mental discipline to ignore them, then ye may live; if not, we shall never hear ye again, and that shall be that.”

“What do they – ” Henry visibly checked himself on the verge of asking his question, his face screwing up in concentration as he reconsidered it. “Er, what are their physical forms?”

“Ach, if ye were stonegnomes I should sing ye how they sound, but if I recall aright you humans do not hear as we do...”

“Sing,” Henry murmured, so quietly that it was quite obvious he had not meant to speak aloud, “Why, the number of questions I have...”

“I shall do the best I can with poor words. Fog Demons be not much more than that – fog, and cursedly hard to hear coming. Much like the shadesmir in that respect, but the shadesmir do not... consume. Perhaps they be some distant cousin? The insects of the Middledark form their main prey, and those insects can be as large as me or as small as ye, master and lady mage,” she nodded to Henry and Van Dyne. “A threat in their own right; they be many legged, with shells that require quite an axe to break, although their joints are weaker. Their flesh be poisonous even to us, however.  The bats ye’ve already encountered, aye, but they get larger, quieter, and nastier below. And the Walkers...” she turned grave. “They are everywhere; ye cannot avoid hearing them, but ye must _not_ listen. They stand not quite twice as tall as either of ye,” she indicated Donald and Stark, “and they’ve the same number of limbs as any of us; but they be thin and spindly, great long reaching arms. Stone cannot block them, nor any strange substance which might be found in your great old city; they move where they will.”

“Are they also some fog, then?”

“I dinnae know. It be impossible to observe them so closely and live, do ye not hear?”

“I do,” said Van Dyne. “Very well. Shadesmir, bats, fog demons, giant insects, and Walkers.” She counted them off one by one on the fingers of one hand. “What of less, hmm, active perils? If you built the caves right down to old York, then I’d wager we at least not need fear cave-ins – truly, Grommet, your people’s stone-magic is a marvel. I should love a chance to learn about it properly.”

“I should be happy to answer any questions ye have,” Grommet said kindly – and just as obviously happy for the change in subject. “Though I know not how much help I may be. The magic ye produce seems itself the stuff of fairy-tales, to me – why, ye _fly_ , for all love.”

“We have much to teach each other, then,” said Van Dyne. She gave Grommet’s coat a covetous look. “And especially you must show me how you work your leather.” 

“But magic must come first, if we’re exchanging knowledge,” said Henry, in a dangerously reasonable tone. Dangerous to him, in his obliviousness; Donald found himself forced to look away as Van Dyne met this with a decidedly narrow look. It had been a full year and then some since his own beloved had passed, and yet... that remarkable acrimony that could only exist between close couples conjured to his mind memories that he thought he had laid to rest. Strange, how he could now even miss their rare arguments.

He reminded himself of their words upon the ship, and forced the thought from his mind. Grommet, wise to the tensions in the air, said hurriedly, “Ach, if ye return from below then we may speak o’ many things. But as for – ”

She cut off as the stone floor pulsed beneath them all, a thin, shuddery sensation that made the entire world seem quite off kilter to the four humans. Grommet knelt, placing her hand to the floor and wobbling it back upward and downward; this did not help their vague dizziness. “I fear ye might see the beasts of the Middledark quicker than I’d wish. There is a Fog Demon approaching the settlement. Still, the sentries ought divert it and lead it away – ”

The floor roiled; Gromet’s ears quivered frantically. The stonegnomes that had been listening in the shadows were now all running about, and the four humans found themselves swayed off their feet as the entire present stonegnome population moved the rock around them. The entirety of the cavern shifted and deformed, in a way the humans could not track – it appeared, impossibly, as if the stonegnomes were moving the _entire_ cavern, picking up their home and running with it as fast as they could. Many were speaking in their strangely ranged tongue, but even if they could not hear all of the words, the humans could see the panic.

“It is not distracted by the sentries!” Grommet said, her explanation brief; her hands were moving as quickly as any of the other stonegnomes as they pulled off such transmutation as had both Van Dyne and Pym looking on in awe.

“No,” said Stark softly, a brief idea that he had earlier not developed now coming to the fore of his thoughts – and making him heartily regret his earlier delay in pursuing it. “Grommet, you said they were attracted to some of the human buildings?”

Both of the stonegnome’s ears turned toward him; the Lord High Wizard saw immediately that Grommet understood his meaning. But if her form was strange to human eyes, then her courage was the match of any human being Stark had ever met, and Grommet said immediately, “We shall _not_ be leaving you to it. If it shall catch us, it shall catch us!” She glanced upward, and cringed. “Aye, if only we had a bit more of a roof!”

The stonegnomes now moved in concert, thrusting their arms upward in perfect choreography; the chamber they stood within moved rapidly upward, bursting into the great cavern that they had come to scant hours ago – although, reflected Stark, it felt much longer. The chamber’s walls dropped away; the entire collection of perhaps twenty stonegnomes and four humans was balanced precariously upon a rapidly rising disc of stone that raced up the side of the massive pillars. Stark went to the rim, with a carelessness born of the ability to fly, and looked over the edge. He did not need to see the bottom to sense the malevolence below.

“It’s following us,” Stark said, and he caught the eyes of the others; they nodded, not as one, but all with grave solemnity. “You have too many good people here. Light speed you, Grommet.”

“No!” cried Grommet, but Stark had already cast his spells; Pym tethered himself to Blake’s shoulder once more; and flight lifted all four of them over the side of the stonegnome’s rapidly ascending  platform. About them, other gnomes rapidly climbed pas them, glimpsed and then gone as they passed through what was visible inside the sphere of Stark’s Light spell – but the humans headed _down_.

It was waiting there, a shapeless darker patch of shadow in the endless gloom, and Stark kept them all in the air even as he drew more power in readiness – power that he perhaps could not afford to spare, if Grommet’s description of the Middledark was apt – but all they needed to do was to make the accursed thing stop chasing their hosts. Then they could run away themselves, perhaps – and yet he somehow knew it would pursue them without rest. For all that it had no eyes, no face, no method of expression, he could feel its attention – fixed upon his Light spell with all the intensity of a lethal hunter.

“We must lead it from the stonegnomes first,” said Van Dyne quietly.

Perhaps the Fog Demon could hear her, in a fashion – or perhaps it merely ran out of patience. But at her words, it sprung, a roiling Darkness that Stark doubted even the brightest Light could disperse. He launched them all up, away – but that way lay their still-fleeing hosts; in a trice, he corrected, speeding down at an angle and over the floor. He could outstrip it, but barely – it boiled along behind them like a thunderhead.

“Look out!” cried Pym, and out of reflex, Stark corrected upward again. Below, the Fog Demon... stopped?

“I saw it as well,” said Blake. “A faint Light upon the floor.”

The Demon below swirled around it, blocking whatever it had been from view. But it stilled, and Stark felt the return of that terrible attention upon them all. Whatever the Light had been... it yet found them more interesting prey. They did not have much time.

“Van Dyne, I know you’re deadly with at least a few evocation spells,” Stark said quietly. “Try them at range. Pym – stay a distraction, but don’t close with it, for Light’s sake. Doctor Blake – stay behind me. We may very well need you greatly after.”

In truth, there was not much Blake could have done otherwise; for he was, as Stark well knew, still in the grip of Stark’s flight spells, and thus no more in command of his own movement than a damsel in the grasp of some fairy-tale giant. But the doctor nodded, recognizing his own vulnerability – and need to remain close to Stark.

“If it is of the Dark, then the Light may hurt it,” Pym said grimly, shaking out his own bracelet – and if there had been any remaining suspicion in Stark’s mind about what had attracted the Fog Demon, it vanished as the mist _lunged_.

A strange word to describe an action by something that appeared to be little more than shadow, perhaps a very tiny cloud; yet it was apt enough, and the deeper darkness of its being went roiling over the stone toward Pym as he dropped, Lit his bracelet, and grew all in the same second. Then he went tearing away, massive boots pounding the stone floor while the shade followed like the vengeful Dark itself, and Stark and Van Dyne nearly lost him from their sphere of light. They did not, however, because Van Dyne reacted to her husband’s sudden peril by shaking out her own bracelet and diving towards the Fog Demon. Unlike her husband, she had devoted enough time to combat evocation to win a fair number of duels; and now, taking his idea, she fused her blasting spells with the radiance of Light, combining the two magical forms and hurling them as one at the Fog Demon. The Demon thinned, elongating, as part of it pursued Pym, and part of it turned back to confront this new source of Light – with a scream not unlike nails down a chalkboard.

“Oh, you like Light, but not too much, eh?” murmured Stark, pulling one of the beads of his bracelet off. He’d already used more flares than he’d planned to have needed by now – but so it went. The flare of Light took another moment of effort to charge, and then he added a grenade spell and tossed it at the creature. The brilliant flash of Light hit it with the force of a thundercrack.

For a moment, he thought it might fly apart. The dark mass of it seethed and shuddered, and yet –

_“Watch out!”_

In a single moment, Stark discovered he had been wrong about three things. First, the Fog Demon did not fly apart; it rose and took another lunging leap from midair, and a part of him noted that he really should have expected the thing to be fully capable of flight; after all, it was little more than a cloud.  

Second, although he was perfectly right that Blake could not fly himself about, he had been wrong in thinking the doctor completely helpless. To minimize the energy required to maintain the doctor’s Darkwards, Blake had taken to standing as close as decency allowed, and for the same reason Stark had kept him close in flight. But that meant Blake was in a position to pull him out of the way of the charging Fog Demon.

Of course, since they were both buoyed by flight spells, and not ones controlled by the good doctor, what that did was to rotate them about, and in shoving Stark away, Blake put himself firmly in the Fog Demon’s path.

Which led to Stark shortly discovering the third thing he had been wrong about: the Darkwards were certainly not up to withstanding the Fog Demon. He felt the wards he had been maintaining upon Blake – along with the flight spells – cease so abruptly that the backlash made his vision double, and then the Fog Demon was lunging past him and down, its entire mass settling back on the floor as his own instincts took him the rest of the way out of its path.

Away from the man whom he had certainly just doomed to death with his own carelessness.

“No,” someone said hoarsely, and none of the three mages could later have said who it was.

Stark did not waste time considering options. This was far from the first time he had run afoul of the dangers of the Dark; but always before that had been due to his own experiments. This was merely due to his own foolishness – and someone else had paid the price. He did not hesitate as he drew deeply upon the deep, forbidden well of power that was House Stark’s legacy, drawing his hands apart in mathematical prayer, forming a point of pure Light. He shut his eyes against its brilliance, but it burned through his eyelids anyway – and yet that was unimportant. For a moment, he held all the Light of the Sun within his hands.

And then he bowed his head and let it fall.

It burst upon the Fog Demon with a vengeance that none of the three mages could see, for Pym and Van Dyne had been equally unfortunate at their dismal attempts to shade their eyes from Stark’s spell. Yet for all the pain of looking at that _much_ Light, it _was_ Light, and so did them no permanent harm. When the sight before them had returned to such a level of Light as the human eye could properly process, the spots faded away from their vision and they found themselves looking at the scattered remnants – shadowy patches, really – of the Fog Demon, surrounded by crackling Light that ate away at the shadows until they were naught, before vanishing like will o’ the wisps. They left no sign of the Fog Demon’s physical presence – no sign except the motionless form of Dr. Donald Blake, lying upon the stone floor of the cavern, his trusty walking stick still clutched in his hand.

Stark allowed himself to drop to the floor from a considerably higher height than was truly wise, and he did not take the impact well, allowing too much of the shock of it to settle in his knees. They did not support him, and he sank to the floor, the abrupt weariness within his own soul rendering him unable to stand.

“Oh, Light,” Van Dyne said, landing upon her husband’s shoulder as he carefully trudged his way toward their two fallen forms, shrinking as he did so until she was the one carrying him. She set him and then herself down beside Blake’s head and reached out to place one tiny palm against his face – and then she blinked.

“Light in Heaven,” Pym said, and it was in a very different tone from Van Dyne’s but a moment before. Stark found himself looking up sharply.

“Dr. Blake? _Donald?_ ” Van Dyne asked, frantically patting at the doctor’s face with her small hand. “Oh, you foolish, brilliant man. Much like another two men I know! But you must wake up!”

“He’s alive?” Stark asked, his voice gravelly. The Lord High Wizard stumbled to his feet and went over to kneel at their fallen companion’s side as well – just in time to see Blake stir, although it should have been impossible. There was no reddish flare of Darkwards about his form, and Stark knew intimately well how even the highest reaches of the Greydark would devour organic flesh – not to mention the way the Fog Demon had eaten his spells, and Grommet’s prediction of how it would leave naught but bones. For that matter, the Dark itself ought to have stripped Blake of his clothes, leaving naught but a rapidly decaying skeleton – and yet they were as untouched as he.

And then Blake opened his eyes, and the three mages saw the banked Light within them; the same Light which spilled in the tiniest motes from his breath. He pushed himself to a sitting position with a groan – and Stark’s aid, although in truth it did not seem much needed – and stared down at his hands.

“I owe you my life,” said Stark, his voice hushed.

“And perhaps that is why I did not lose mine,” said Blake, looking over to stare oddly at his walking stick. “Perhaps...”

“Have you remembered something?” asked Van Dyne, but Blake shook his head.

“I feel as if I should,” he said, still staring down at himself. “What _am_ I? And yet...” there was wonder in his voice. “And yet. Yes. I have been here before...”

“Donald?” asked Van Dyne – Lady Janet – and from her, the assumed liberty was more heartwarming than shocking to the good doctor. The corner of Stark’s mouth quirked upward in a smile, but he could not deny for a moment missing the childhood friend of his youth, when they had both been so young that names such as ‘Anthony’ and ‘Janet’, or even ‘Tony’ and ‘Jan’, had been freely available to any other person of such tender years.

How long had it been since his circle of confidants had retreated from many to one – and then to none at all?

“It would not have been the same, then,” Blake said slowly. “What is bravery if there is no threat, no fear? What is courage without the mountain to overcome?”

“I heartily retract any doubts I might have had about the wisdom of your accompanying us,” said Pym, and Blake astonished them all by laughing.

 

 

 

“It certainly seems to have formed an attachment to _you_ ,” Pym observed somewhat later, in a rather more sour tone, as he jerked his hands away from the dim glow of the pinnacle. This was the source of the Light that he had spotted earlier: a conical bit of worked stone, emerging incongruously from the floor, a carved metal bar affixed to its very peak. It was the metal that glowed with Light – or had; now it was even dimmer than before, a large portion of the meagre Light remaining to it having crawled up Stark’s arm and fastened itself about his other wrist, providing him with two separate sources of Light. He was currently attempting to coax them to co-join. Pym, meanwhile, had received nothing but a nasty shock for his own curiosity.

“It seems likely that this is the uppermost point of one of the mage towers of House Stark,” said Stark meditatively. “Howard I built five of them himself, and I believe that there were at least three constructed even before that – his notes lament about having to abandon them all. If I could get a proper altimetry check I could determine which it was!” He shook his head in regret. “No two of them were the same height; he boasted that each successive tower reached closer to the Sun.”

“Eight towers seems unlikely,” said Pym. “It’s not a very magically strong number.”

There was a pause, which abruptly became awkward when Van Dyne realized that Stark was deliberately avoiding answering that statement. Because it was true, or because it was _not_ true? Before the pause could drag out to odious levels, she suggested, “Not if he was halted mid-construction. Thirteen would be the most favourable, if extraordinarily ambitious.”

“Ah, true.”

Stark remained conspicuously silent – as conspicuously silent as a noble of House Stark could ever allow himself to be – and Van Dyne affirmed her conclusion. Howard Stark had not been aiming at eleven towers, or thirteen. But what did that mean?

“Yet if it is a tower of House Stark built so close to the location of the key, then might it not have a greater chance than one in eight to be the one which we seek?” she said.

“It would be wiser than risking the stonegnomes again,” said Blake. The other three nodded silently; Stark seemed shamefaced. “And though this expedition was planned to last for weeks, if we can cut it shorter, we should. I do not think any of you shall be so fortunate as I was.”

“A very good point,” Stark murmured, leaving the solace of his silence at last; but if he meant to be discreet about it, then he failed, for both Pym and Blake took consideration of his behaviour as well as the canny Van Dyne. “Let me see if I can take us in, then.” 

“It is barely more than a foot across at the floor.” Pym shook his head. “Even if you blew the top off of it, you and Donald would not fit. We shall have to dig down – and I fear that I shall not be capable of aiding in that endeavour without a good night’s sleep,” he added ruefully.

“I think you underestimate House Stark,” said the current Lord of that House, and he sat down cross-legged upon the ground, steepling his fingers and gazing at the tip of the spire with his eyes half-lidded.

“Theirs has always being a House obsessed with flying,” Van Dyne said softly to her husband, so as not to disturb Stark’s concentration. “It should not surprise me.”

“It’s _buried_ in _rock_ ,” Pym retorted – but equally softly. Skepticism or no, low birth or no, he had the good manners not to interrupt a mage in the middle of an unknown working. For one thing, particularly where Evokers were concerned, interruptions had the habit of being greeted... explosively.

“Methinks Janet is right,” said Blake. His voice was hushed as well, although he had an even scanter idea of what Stark was meaning to do, for he took his cue from his companions. And as they were both sitting upon his shoulder, great volume was hardly necessary. “And that you are objecting merely to object, Henry.”

“I’m getting a bit tired of surprises,” the Magistar growled.

“Sorry,” said Stark, his eyes snapping open – but his gaze was far away. He reached out and touched the tip of the Spire, and the air snapped around them all. The Light went out.

Then it returned ten-fold.


	3. The Middledark

“ _Oh,_ ” said Pym, not particularly intelligently despite his great intellect.

“Heavens,” said Van Dyne, rather more intelligently if not more eloquently.

“You come from a mighty line of mages, I see,” said Blake, which was finally more to the point.

Stark himself, having gone quite slack-jawed, was not in the best position to be doing his forefathers proud; but after a moment he recollected his wits, closed his mouth, and scrambled to his feet, tugging his cuffs into order as he did so. Of them all, he was the only one who had expected the effect his spell had had; his amazement thus solely stemmed from the surroundings they now found themselves in, unlike the others, who were also about fifty percent stupefied by the _how_. Yet those surroundings were amazement enough, for the great chandeliers hanging over this enormous circular room – fully a hundred and fifty feet across, and Stark knew they were in the upper quarter of the tower – still blazed with Light, despite the full century that must have passed since its abandonment. It was enough to turn the room as bright as day, and even his own laboratories in the lower rock of New York, where the Light-holding crystals were powered by the Dweomer itself, could not match this brilliance.

Some of the effect was due to the design of the room itself. The chandeliers were decorative pieces, meant to impress, and they were aided in this endeavour by the whole of the architecture. Not only the windows but the ceiling as well were crystal, cut edges perfectly placed – so Stark’s trained mathematician’s mind told him – to refract, amplify, and reflect the Light. No silver backings, these; they relied upon total internal reflection and a near lossless medium. Stark’s fingers stayed to the cords of supplies he wore; he itched to take measurements. Where _were_ they drawing power from?

The thought dimmed his enthusiasm rather abruptly, but even Van Dyne was enraptured by the dual displays of Light and magic, and did not notice.

“That was an actual teleportation spell,” said Pym, rounding upon Anthony at last. “ _Teleportation._ ”

Stark shrugged. “It’s been in the family grimoires for ages – even before Rising.”

“Why in the Dark haven’t you ever told anyone about it?”

“It’s not as all-purpose as you might think,” said Stark, refusing to let his eyes slide sideways. Years of practice among Society made it easy to repress the urge, but he’d never been able to rid himself of it entirely.

“Good Heavens, man, think of the applications! Think of the time saved! The effort!”

“It could save lives,” said Blake, although his voice was mild, not at all accusatory compared to Pym’s wild gestures. “Too many patients die before a doctor ever reaches them – aye, it has always been so for the worst of injuries.”

“It’s _not as all purpose as you might think,”_ Stark repeated, and there was an edge in his voice that silenced them.

“It is beyond what any Magistrar of the University is now capable of,” said Van Dyne, her brisk voice overriding Stark where her husband’s indignation had failed to make an impact. “Why do you not want them to use it as a jumping off point?”

Stark hesitated, and then reluctantly tugged his left sleeve upwards and held out his forearm, hand turned palm down, for their inspection. His look was half-rueful; that, for himself, for tugging his shirt-sleeve right over it this most recent wound had done neither him nor his shirt any favours; he should have bandaged it first. Yet he had hoped – foolishly, perhaps – to avoid this very scene, and it was the reasons for those hopes that left him looking half-wary as well. The cut would not maim him – he had placed it carefully enough, and it bled only sluggishly – and he might have tended it later.

“See the brilliance of House Stark!” he said, rendering Van Dyne and Pym voiceless with shock. “And its honour.”

“That is a deep cut,” said Blake with a frown, and he pulled out his first aid kit again, as well as a water bottle. “Come.”

Van Dyne and Pym engaged in a silent conversation, looks laden heavy with meaning, while Blake washed the blood from Stark’s arm and wrapped a clean cloth tightly around it, tying it off below Stark’s wrist before allowing him to roll his cuff down again – a quick spell having dried and removed the worst of the blood.

“Unless I am badly mistaken, this was self-inflected. May I ask why you felt it necessary?” the doctor inquired.

“It’s blood magic,” said Stark conversationally. “Scarcely a step above necromancy – the key _to_ necromancy, in fact, as haemomancy predates necromancy itself, and is necessary for a great many of the rituals of the Black School.”

“Yet this was not necromancy?” asked Van Dyne, her voice scrupulously neutral. “Merely haemomancy?”

“Haemomancy.”

“It’s your own blood to do with as you will,” said Pym.

“That the corrupting influence has never been _proven_ does not mean it does not exist,” said Van Dyne. “Stark – _Anthony_...” she sighed. “We are your friends. You may trust us with this. I shall not deny that I do not approve, but that is for your sake, Anthony – Light! I wish you had no need to use such magic. I shall not ask how you learned it.”

“The secrets of House Stark must be preserved,” said Anthony. He smiled, a small, sad thing. “It’s a double-sided duty.”

“Of course,” murmured Janet.

“I’ve never built it into my own constructions, but Stark Tower has been in New York possibly since before New York itself existed; and the manor was built by my grandmother.” He exhaled, pacing away from them, as far as the width of the room would allow – which was nonetheless more space than they had been able to see for the past day, save for those brief bursts when Anthony had fired off his flares. “I’ve never seen much use for it. But I know too well Howard I’s taste for the grandiose – ah, you’ve all seen Stark Tower; you would know it as well. We are at least two hundred feet below the tip of that spire, and I do not think you capable of boring through that much rock in any time less than a week.”

“Anthony, we understand. My concern is not for your reasons; it is for _you_.” Janet flitted over to him, hovering in front of his face and peering into his eyes, as if thereby she could ascertain any damage to his soul; and Anthony had not the heart to inform her of the futility of such an endeavour. Instead he forced his smile to appear more genuine – succeeding admirably, despite the apparent contradiction in terms – and bowed his head graciously.

“Have no fear, Van Dyne – _Janet_ ,” he amended upon receipt of her pointed look. “I shall keep my soul as unbloodied as possible, no matter the state of my hands. And my thanks, good doctor – you have done a neater job of it than I ever could in the past.”

“Donald, please,” said Blake firmly. “We are all companions with the same purpose here. And let us recall that purpose afore we forget it entirely.”

“Donald is right,” said Henry. “This room is empty, for all that it is wondrous – I can have no doubt that it was designed by a Stark.”

“Why, thank you,” said Anthony dryly.

Henry blinked at him, and then saw the more obvious meaning from his ill-ordered of words. “I had not meant,” he spluttered, but Anthony waved off the apology as unnecessary.

Henry’s words were true, after all; aside from the brilliantly glittering crystals, there were nothing else in the massive room. The stone tiled floor was covered in a thick layer of dust that Anthony and Donald’s boots were now disturbing; but the curiously flattening nature of the Dark – present even here, despite so much Light – kept it from throwing up choking clouds of the stuff. Beneath it lay stone, the same grey stuff as the stonegnomes built with, and certainly nothing that any Stark would ever have used for a floor inlaid with gold – though the signs of that inlay were now few. The corrosion might have been somewhat held at bay here, but it still existed, and the Darkwards surrounding Anthony, Henry and Janet still glowed a dull red.

“So much Light, after so many years,” Henry remarked. “Is this, too, powered by the Dweomer?”

“After a fashion,” said Anthony; but he appeared loath to elaborate further.

Henry was not deterred. “A fashion?”

Anthony retrieved his blue stone device from his pocket, again, and held it out for a moment – then frowned, half-puzzled. “It’s not connected directly,” he affirmed, “although the energy...” his face went still, and he turned his attention back to the stone in his hands. “Well. Of more importance is that the anchor must be very near – very likely it is within this tower.”

“That is a great stroke of luck!” said Janet, her eyes bright.

“Can you narrow the search further?” Donald inquired.

“I’m afraid not. It’s not so near enough for that.”

Henry leaned out from Donald’s shoulder. “Let me have a look – two minds are better than one; we may be able to refine it.”

But Anthony tucked the stone away, shaking his head. “Ah, that would be unwise for me,” he said, and although he smiled it did not reach his eyes.

“Secrets of House Stark?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“Well then,” said Janet, taking the lead briskly, “We’ll have to look the old-fashioned way. Certainly, if it were in this room we’d have seen it by now – so how do we get out of this room and search the rest of the Tower?”

“It does seem strange that there is nothing at all here,” observed Donald.

“We lack keys or a password aside from the blood of a Stark. In truth, this is a glorified holding room.”

“They do not trust their own kin?” asked Donald.

“Haemomancy doesn’t require a willing participant.”

“I see,” said Donald, frowning. “Shall we be able to exit, then?”

“These wards may be mighty, but with a closer look at them I can bring them down,” Anthony said with confidence. “Abjuration is my primary school, after all!” He laughed to himself at that, softly; but the surety in his eyes was unfeigned. “No, if you will permit me to spend some further time in thought, here, I have no doubt that I can weave my way into this place.”

“Can we be of use?” asked Janet.

“Not very much,” said Anthony, though in a wholly professional manner, as one Magistrar to another, recognizing the differences in their fields of expertise. “But should another Fog Demon come calling, then we would do well to have a guard. Although I am not certain it could bypass _these_ wards...”

Anthony’s words were true enough, and so the other three set a watch; but it was a watch that began to falter in its diligence as hours wore by. At Donald’s insistence, they prepared and ate a hot meal. Henry pulled out some further amounts of Stark’s equipment and began studying the spells upon the Tower, and then, when he found them little related to his areas of expertise, cloaked several samples of the native stone within Darkwards and began running divinations. Janet investigated in much the same manner upon samples of bat-hide that she had been given by the stonegnomes. Donald slept, and when he awoke some time later to discover that his pocketwatch was insisting it had been seven hours and his companions could not believe it had been more than two, he railed at them until they, too, retreated to their bedrolls, and slumbered as he kept the watch. Even Stark went easily enough, having sat so still for so long that he could barely stand, his feet having long since fallen asleep – though not before he had complained loudly enough that, simply to silence him, both Janet and Donald had wound up helping him rub the life back into his numb extremities.

“The spells are contained within lines upon the floor,” said Henry the next morning – Donald was the only one willing to accept the pocketwatches’ unanimous verdict of it being early evening. “It is like what Mga. Munroe does when she channels lightning through conductive paths.”

“You know I cannot comment,” said Anthony without opening his eyes. In acceptance of Donald’s indignation over the dangers of lost blood-flow to extremities, he was quite comfortably situated this morn, so much so that if the other three – Janet and Henry in particular – had not known how intensely focused he could become in pursuit of a magical task, they might have suspected it of being a ruse to allow him to lie abed longer.

“Oh, ignore me, Anthony,” said Henry, “I am speculating only. Jan, thoughts? You’re a much better evoker than I.”

“I can’t say Ororo’s spells have ever made much sense to me, dear; she takes a completely different approach than – well, nearly any other Evoker, as far as I have seen. But, yes,” and now Janet put aside her own apparatus to study the Light in the floors with a keen eye. “Perhaps... it does seem all connected; one enormous circuit for the spells to run through.”

“If we could break it open – ”

“That’s really not necessary,” said Anthony, with much greater irritation this time; he opened his eyes and sat up, frowning at them. “If you _please_ , m’Lady, good Sir. I am trying to concentrate.”

The strain in his expression was not that of a man interrupted mid-thought; Janet cast her eyes downward and made a demurred apology. But her gaze, when it returned upward, was cool and calculating. “House Oaths are not often so restrictive as to prevent the listener from hearing _speculation_.”

“Leave it, Van Dyne,” Anthony said, his voice clipped, and he lay back down again.

Henry would have thrown himself at the man – growing along the way – for speaking so to his wife; but Janet cooled him with a touch upon his cheek; then she bent in to give him a kiss as well, and whispered, “Let it go. If he has reason to fear... then it is not his fault.”

“The more I learn about House Stark, the more I wonder what _else_ is hiding in this tower,” said Henry grimly. But he dropped the subject – at least aloud – and he made no move to begin dismantling the spell-circuitry, although he continued to study it.

His wife did not. She studied Anthony, instead, and considered what he had not said.

Six hours later, at midnight, the Lord High Wizard rose from his bedroll with the tranquil euphoria of a mage who has just unlocked one of the secrets of the universe – or so men and women at such times were wont to call them, no matter how arcane or trivial the point discovered might seem to persons of a more mundane bent. In this Lord Stark was a perfect example: he was not flushed, nor breathing heavily, but his steps were light and his expression dream-like; he walked to the centre of the room, knelt, and tapped twice upon the floor. It fell away at his touch, curling outward: a staircase spiraling downward.

“There it is,” said Anthony, blinking very slowly.

“Don’t fall in,” said Henry, not entirely in jest, for he himself was no stranger to that half-dreaming state of discovery.

Janet swatted her husband lightly upon the arm. “Come have some coffee.”

“Coffee?” Anthony repeated the word. “Oh.” He climbed to his feet – the grace of triumph slipping from him, making him clumsy and twitching – “Ah, damn,” he cursed, as he did indeed fall and barely caught himself with a spell.

“A hundred years later and the spells on this place are strong enough to have Light burn like day, and _still_ enough left over to knock you on your ass,” said Henry with all the common vulgarity of his upbringing. Janet, considering what might happen at the next dinner with her mother, concealed a wince. “It’s almost enough to see why they turned to haemomancy.”

“Hmm,” replied Anthony, retrieving a coffee mug from Donald.

“We should rest here again, I think,” said Donald, watching him. “Your ancestors are truly workers of marvels and miracles, Stark – Anthony,” the doctor amended when Stark raised an eyebrow over his coffee cup, the opening of which seemed to be vacuum suctioned to his face. “Yet we cannot assume that all their works hold. We should take advantage of this refuge while we have it.”

Wisely, he did not suggest that Anthony was probably in great need of rest at the moment; certainly his behaviour, of the sort that Donald had not witnessed before, had worried the doctor. But Anthony guessed at Donald’s worries anyway. “I’ll be fine, Donald. It’s really just magical fatigue – and the physical tiredness from that passes quickly enough. And you forget I am a Stark, even as you praise my forefathers – I have magic to spare, even if the doing of it might leave me tranced on occasion!”

“You are not the only one who has been working magic,” Donald said quickly, but this was a mistake, for the other two mages of the company immediately bristled.

“We’ve been doing naught for the past day and a half,” said Janet with a toss of her head, beating her husband to the punch; which was as well for their cause, as she was in general the more eloquent speaker. “Naught but supporting our own Darkwards, which are as nothing upon us when we are so small; there has not even been a Light needed to be maintained. Experimentation is not half so difficult as the ward-breaking that Anthony’s been doing. The path forward is right _there_ ; I say we go onward as soon as the coffee is done.”

“I am quite for that,” said Henry in support.

Anthony detatched himself from his coffee mug long enough to give Donald a roguish grin that would not have been out of place in a park of the Commons. “Unless you need time to rest and heal yourself, doctor...”

Donald rolled his eyes in exasperation – a habit that spoke of the long years he’d spent on the rougher side of the Cities – and reached out to claim the last of the coffee in the kettle, eliciting cries of dismay from the three mages. “My leg is better than it has ever been before,” he told them as he doctored the drink to his liking. “Very well, if you think you know your own limits well enough.”

“Well enough,” said Anthony, turning serious. “Though it seems you shall have to relearn yours – if, indeed, they are at their current highest point. You did not have some further revelatory dream last night?”

“Nothing I could discern any meaning from,” said Donald, shaking his head. “Colours of more hues than I have ever seen in waking, but they slipped from me as soon as I opened my eyes, alas. But you are right. I think this is only the beginning for me.”

“No second thoughts?” asked Janet.

“None except concern for overzealous mages,” said Donald, and Janet retorted by stealing a thimbleful of his coffee for her own miniature cup.

The stairway was made of crystal, and flashed Light beneath Anthony and Donald’s footfalls, but the ceiling was not afire with it as the entry-way had been. Instead, the closed-in stairwell was primarily lit by sconces – great, heavy things that were so archaically unfashionable and expensive that they could have been found nowhere else except at an ancient family home. There were the occasional hangings, too – banners embroidered with the emblem of House Stark – and while Donald made his plodding way downward (for here, he was hampered by his leg), Janet amused herself with examining them. They had not withered at all in the Darkness. Yet while she might have pointed this out to the High Wizard, she saw that he was far more interested in the flashes of light coming from the steps themselves – he darted up and down several steps at a time, and at each pass would stare at the steps with an expression of concern.

It was Henry who asked bluntly, “Why are you staring at the stairs? You should be looking at these wards – they’re entirely different from the Darkwards, yet just as effective!”

“I got quite a good look at them when I was struggling to bypass them,” Anthony said dryly, crouching to tap at one step. It glittered with Light beneath his fingers. “They are the same type as those on the ceiling, I can tell you that. Perhaps _you_ can tell me this – why do the ones on the ceiling and walls remain at strength, while the ones on the steps and the floors seem to be failing?”

“Well...” Henry said, giving a quick glance to Janet; she raised her eyebrows, but made no gesture to dissuade him. If Anthony wished _now_ to speak of this, then who was he to object? “If they are not connected to the Dweomer – then if they have no outside source, the magic to power them is built _into_ the spells... in the spell-circuitry itself, perhaps? Although the initial charge must have been horrific – the Dweomer would have been used for that, I suppose.”  He snorted. “Which explains why you don’t bother denying the connection. But flares of Light – those are discharges; therefore the charge runs down.”

“Very good,” said Anthony quietly. “So if the wards on these stairs are running down even as we walk upon them, what was in the room above us, and when?” For the floor above had long since lost its charge.

The other two mages stilled – or rather, Henry stilled, and Janet stilled as much as was possible without falling out of the air. Donald set his walking stick down rather heavily, eliciting a brighter-than-usual burst of Light, and then took the opportunity to give the floor a few sharp raps. “Hmm,” he said. Anthony raised an eyebrow at him, but the doctor shook his head.

“No, nothing further. But – there is a door here, upon the next landing,” he reported, sticking his head far enough around the turn to see.

The rest of them gathered to look – or, in Henry’s case, simply turned around. There was indeed a door, decorated with the same ostentatious manner as the sconces, complete with brass knocker. The floor about it had faded into dull grey stone; when Donald and Anthony cautiously approached, their footsteps drew less Light... and with each burst, the dullness grew.

“So something was here, beyond this door,” said Henry quietly. “And in the room above.” He shook his head. “I took a good look about that place – nothing seemed amiss, nothing was forced... Jan?”

“No, I concur,” said Janet, her brow creased. “But that makes no sense. Anthony – was this the only way down?”

“Yes.” Anthony was kneeling again, tracing his fingers along the floor with his eyes closed.

“But they didn’t take this stair.” Henry shook his head.

“Then we are faced with a choice,” Donald said as he approached the dead stone, tapping it at first cautiously and then giving it a few good whacks with his stick. No light flared. “Do you wish to investigate this matter, Magistrars? Or do we continue our search for the anchor?” Although his tone was scrupulously neutral, the skeptical frown on his face made it clear which course of action he expected them to choose.

“The anchor comes first, of course,” Anthony said, rising to his feet. “But for that... we need to investigate this tower. So it seems the two goals coincide.”

“Oh, good,” said Henry, staring at the floor – specifically, where the luminous crystal faded into deadened grey.

“Can you open this door, then?” asked Janet, flitting nearer to it. “I can’t imagine it’s unwarded, if whatever Darkness that did this to the floors did not pass it.”

“Unless whatever it was didn’t need to,” said Anthony grimly. “But – yes, I can open it.” He stepped forward and, lifting the heavy brass knocker, brought it down upon the door thrice – the traditional number of greeting and entering. At the third boom the door shook, and even Donald could feel the magical energy of the wards behind it gathering – but Anthony raised other hand quickly, palm up, and spoke a word that blew the door clean off its hinges.

Beyond lay the Darkness, now unlit by the ever-burning sconces; Anthony cast them a last, worried look and then stepped over the threshold. Immediately his own Darkwards flared brighter than they had ever before – and yet their light, too, was oppressed by the impenetrable blackness beyond. It seemed that the Dark had grown thicker still.

Janet flitted around and ahead of him, calling Light before he could do so; Dweomer-like magic or not, he was still a great many times larger than either her or Henry, and had been working a great deal more magic besides – not that she expected him to ever admit that. It was far better to simply not ask. Her pinpoint of Light shone over a room devoid of decoration – but, no, that was not entirely correct... oddly-shaped stone lumps were placed here and there, and the floor was uneven.

“It’s impossible to tell what this place was,” Henry murmured from Donald’s shoulder. “Laboratory? Living quarters?”

“There may be spells left behind,” suggested Janet. “We can extend our Darkwards over some of this long enough to do some divinations, surely.” She flitted closer to a few odd bits of stone that poked out of the floor like tiny spires – or table-legs. “Perhaps... furniture?”

“Organics are destroyed, but metal decays into stone,” said Anthony. “It seems likely. Very well, Van Dyne, let’s try this.”

“Janet, Anthony,” she planted her hands on her hips. “I insist.”

“I’m sure you do, good lady,” he said, irritatingly. “Might we get on with it?”

She would have peered at him more closely – but in that moment Donald tipped his head to the side and asked in a hushed voice, “Do you hear that?”

That gained him immediate silence. Jan landed to still her wings – yet even entirely motionless, breath held, none of the other three could make out any sound. She peered upward at him. “Hear what?”

“A deep sound,” he breathed, tightening his grip on his walking stick. “It – ” but before he could describe it, the rest began to hear it as well. It was not a sound at first: it was a vibration, so drawn out that they could feel in only in their bones, but it rapidly rose in pitch until it was audible: a wail, perhaps of grief, or perhaps of rage. It was impossible to tell. But beneath it... the distant sound of stone hitting stone. Something had begun to move.

“If that’s one of the Walkers that Grommet described, we’d best run,” said Janet, leaping back into the air.

“No,” Hank objected, “A sound such as this? She would have described it to us. This is something else.” It was his turn, now, for his gaze to go unfocused; transmutation spells wrapped themselves around his ears and mouth. “Aha!” he exclaimed, pleased. “There _are_ insects here!”

“Insects possibly as large as Grommet herself, so she said,” murmured Donald, with a significant look to Anthony.

The High Wizard grimaced at the recall. “Right. Apologies, Henry, but I don’t see the anchor here, and we’ve the rest of the Tower still to search; there’s no use borrowing trouble before we must. We should move on.” He was, of course, entirely ignoring the other two doorways in the room, but both Donald and Janet were happy to allow him to do so; the thudding was growing inexorably closer.

“No, no,” said Henry vaguely. “The insects are a ways away... whatever that thing is, it isn’t anything I can get a grasp on.”

“ _Out,_ ” said Anthony firmly, and out they went to the stairwell. But the door, of course, had been blasted off its hinges – Anthony looked at it ruefully, and then summoned shimmering lines of warding to hang over it. “That won’t last long in the Darkness,” he admitted. “But the wards on the stairs themselves may turn it back, if it intends me ill.”

They hurried downward, Anthony now providing a shoulder of support to Donald. Above them, the thudding grew closer – closer – and stopped. They all paused; none of them breathed. It must have been right in front of the door.

There was no further sound; the silence drew out. Finally, when all had long since caught their breaths again and were beginning to feel somewhat foolish, Anthony tipped his head toward the downward stairs, and altogether they slowly moved to continue as quietly as they could.

Six turns of the stair later, Donald admitted quietly, “I know not why that sound filled me so with dread. Surely, we have already survived worse in this place.”

“Perhaps,” said Anthony. “Perhaps not.”

“Thank you, High Wizard, for that cheery thought,” said Janet, and her waspish tone made it clear that she had not forgotten his earlier slight. But he merely bowed his head and said nothing.

At the next landing, another ornate, warded door greeted them; this one, too, showed dead stone creeping out from beneath it. Anthony inspected this one for only a moment before placing his hand upon the knob, noting, “A bit more caution is in order, I think. Whatever occurred beyond burned these wards away entirely.”

That managed to attract even Henry’s attention, although only for a moment. Donald gripped his walking stick tightly, staying well upon the Lighted, crystalline area of the landing, while Janet prepared her own evocation spells, pinpricks of ordinary light suffused with a tiny bit of the more extraordinary, ready to be loosed in an instant. An additional golden ward sprang up about Anthony, interweaving with the grim glow of the Darkwards, and then he eased the door open. 

The Darkness beyond was like a suffocating blanket, the Light of Anthony’s bracelet not enough to burn it away until, with a visible grimace, he forced more magic into the spell. Then, like a malevolent shadow, the Dark began to slowly, reluctantly roll back; as Anthony gently pushed the door wider, it revealed a floor covered in twisted stone, as though someone had placed a multitude of ugly brass statues, half-melted them to unrecognizable hulks, and then transmuted them for good measure. Carefully, Anthony began to step around the door, his wrist-Light held high – and then he darted back into the hall and slammed the door shut.

“The thing I really can’t figure out,” he said, in a tone that could have been conversational if the words hadn’t been so rushed that it really came out as, “The-thing-I-really-can’t-figure-out is how Howard I managed to lift the Cities in the first place – which is to say that I know how he did New York but the other six are something of a mystery unless it really does come down to capacitances – how long can a charge be held? For obvious reasons I haven’t been able to test that theory, although I suppose if push comes to shove I might have to try – but I’d much rather work out a better flight spell because I’m dead sure that I can improve on my current efficiencies by – ”

“I thought you said that you had no idea at all how it was done!” Janet objected, fluttering backward and bobbing up and down in an almost wavelike motion. The High Wizard did not curtail his torrent of words at her interruption, however; he merely lowered it to a mutter, now sounding wholly engrossed in lift coefficients. “Anthony?”

She exchanged a baffled look with the other three. “Has he been bespelled?” Donald asked, eyeing the door even more warily.

“Well, it’s one of the easiest ways to snare a mage,” said Henry, sounding bemused. “We’re always able to be distracted by our work. Give me a hand, Donald – if it’s something simple, I’ll be able to break it.” He stood carefully, as Donald brought his hand up to his shoulder, allowing Henry to step down into his palm.

“No, wait,” said Janet suddenly. “It – oh, blast,” she swore, and the other two men looked at her in shock. She stared back crossly. “When I created my wings, it took me days upon days, and I could think of nothing else – the basis of transmutative equations, darling, aleph-zeta-zed equals wye-summation-n-squared, I kept returning to it – ”

“Could it be contagious?” asked Donald.

“Stop being stupid and listen to me!” cried Janet. “I’m trying to explain – that equation is _important_. Henry, darling, when mum begins to make snide comments, I know that you think about your beloved ants, despite all the University training about sitting and making one’s mind still and seeing nothing but that silly meditation candle. A candle isn’t interesting; it doesn’t distract and hold _attention_ the way that our work does, and dearest, please go back to your ants, I think it’s very important right now. Think of them – Donald, surely you must have had complex cases in your career, you might ruminate on how you solved them – ”

But she was too late in explaining this last; her attempt to distract herself had delayed the explanation over-long, and the other two men realized her meaning but lacked her quick initiative to distract themselves upon their own. For a moment, they stared at the door with alarm.

Then that low, whining scream they’d heard above echoed down the stairs, drawing their attention away. There was a sound like shattering glass – and then again. Whatever the creature had been that had pounded the stone, now it was blasting the crystal of the stairs.

“And there’s that thing,” said Anthony, finishing his rapid-fire speech with a resigned sigh. “Though I suppose for a distraction – ”

“You said the wards on the stairs might stop it?” Henry asked, looking upward – a wholly futile effort, of course; the stairs had wound round six times since then. Nonetheless he persisted, as did the others, as though by looking they might see whatever it was before it rounded the bend. The crunch of crystal continued: it was progressing further upon the stair, and although of course they could not see it, it seemed highly unlikely to travel _upward_.

“The Tower did recognize my blood. The floor wards clearly have some defensive component, although perhaps they may be spread too thin for one solid hit to do it,” said Anthony. There was a faint note of fear underlying his voice, apprehension out of proportion to the unknown threat that they faced.

Janet did not fail to catch it. “I suggest we move downwards at speed, gentlemen,” she said firmly, and that was what they did, Anthony solving the issue of Donald’s leg by the simple expedient of casting flight spells upon them both.

They were two more flights down – and had passed another darkened door – when something changed; the sound of that steady, inexorable _thud_ followed by breaking crystal instead turned into one arrhythmic clatter of continuous shattering, with only the occasionally smaller _thud_ intermixed. They flew faster, as fast as they could without bouncing off of the continuously curving walls, but the whatever-it-was was clearly catching up. The shattering echoed, up and down the stairwell and back again, overlapping – but the primary source of it was growing louder, louder –

They reached the bottom of the stairs. Two doors led off of this landing – rather wider than the ones above it – but both were brightly Lit, well-warded.

“Can you get through?” Donald asked Anthony. The High Wizard looked doubtful.

“Try,” commanded Janet. “I shall distract – whatever this is.” She flew closer to the stairs, murmured spell-equations granting her transmutations a temporary power boost – and herself greater strength and speed. The crashing was very near.

Anthony attempted to lay his hand against the door, and was forced to yank it away. “Damn. A bit more touchy, this,” he murmured, rolling up his cuff, and with a quick slash of his hand opened up the back of his arm again, letting some drops of blood drip to the floor before clapping hand over the wound – smearing it all bloody – and then pressing his palm against the door. Yet again the wards lit, and again Anthony flinched back – and then the thing they had been fleeing finished crashing down the stairs.

It was through no fault of Janet’s that she failed to distract the creature before it could be among them, for _crashing_ was a better word for its movement than _walking_ or _running_ – but _rolling_ might have been closer still: it tumbled end over end, unable to stop its own momentum until the floor levelled out. Most of it could, possibly, be called a torso – a _giant_ torso, one standing nearly as tall as Janet at her normal size. Its features were stone, but not the drab, dreary stuff of the Dark: this was granite of the highest quality, and it fairly hummed with powered spell-circuits – particularly from the nubs that suggested it had once had two legs, rather than merely one intact arm and one half-broken upper arm. A part of its head had also been broken away, and spell-circuitry crackled from the inside, throwing off wisps of Light. Other bits of spell-circuitry decorated its outside, in places forming runes.

It roared and pounded the floor with its good fist, creating a small crater. The crystal there sparked a brilliant burst of Light and dimmed.

“As the scion of House Stark, I command you to stop!” Anthony cried, his eyes wide and his bloody hands raised.

Janet, about to launch a distracting bolt at it – for she was entirely unsure that her spells would be enough to burn spell-infused granite, even as damaged as it already looked – paused immediately. Fortunately, so did the creature. Donald – who had positioned himself nearer to the wall, behind Anthony, the better to stay out from underfoot in any ensuing fight – paused as well, so they were all three still.

“...I recognize those symbols,” Henry whispered in Donald’s ear, causing the doctor to flinch. As distracted as Donald had been during their flight, he’d forgotten that the shrunken-down man was still there upon his shoulder. “But where from...?”

“Is it living?” Janet asked, flitting tentatively nearer. The suggestion of a face upon the ruined head did indeed suggest some sort of consciousness – ridiculous, to think that something made of granite could be _living_ – but was it any more ridiculous than the stone-gnomes?

“No,” said Anthony, one bloody hand diving into a pocket; the creature followed the movement, and as its head turned ever so much Donald caught sight of runes that he recognized from long ago. But these runes were older still.

“It is a golem,” Donald declared, as Anthony came up with his crystalline blue stone. It glowed dimly by the Light of his bracelet.

“Oh, no...”

“Fairytales!” said Henry excitedly.

“A what?” asked Janet.

The golem roared at them all and contorted its body, shoving at the floor with its enormous hand; it twisted like a spring and launched at Anthony with unforeseen speed, striking the High Wizard and tossing him into a wall hard enough to crack it. Anthony’s wards flared gold: and when he fell to the ground he did not move.

Janet dove forward as it turned upon Donald, and blasted it with tiny fireballs to draw its attention away – but although it had only one good hand the golem was faster than it had any right to be, and it nearly swatted her directly out of the air. Her magicks had no effect upon it; they did not even cause wards to flare.

“It’s immune to my spells!” she cried, ducking underneath another fearsome blow, and aiming for its face. “All I can do is distract it!”

“It’s the spell-circuitry,” said Hank, “I can see it, it’s _absorbing_ them – oh, watch out!” He leapt from Donald’s shoulder, growing until he touched the ground a full eight-feet tall – and immediately had to duck away from the golem’s mighty fist; if Jan had not distracted it again with another burst he’d have been a head shorter. He took advantage of her distraction, leaning in to try a transmutation spell on its damaged side. “I’m not sure how to disable – ow!”

This time he had been too slow; Janet’s intervention could not save him entirely, and the golem’s fist clipped him with a glancing blow strong enough to break his upper arm. He fell back, face going pale with pain.

“Hank!” Janet cried, and launched a barrage of spells at the golem. It swatted them all away.

“It’s the runes on the outside you need,” said Donald urgently, as he edged around the fight, trying to reach Anthony – who had been thrown, unfortunately, nearer to the opposite wall. “Listen! It’s a very old story – there is one, there, you see on its head? It is _emet_ – you must rub off the first aleph, make it spell _met_!”

“Hank, stay back,” Janet ordered, and flitted in – but her own transmutation boosts were barely enough to keep her clear of the beasts’ hands.

“Yes, I’ll... do that,” said Henry through gritted teeth. “Good thing I’ve got an idea for a distraction...”

“I hope that’s a distraction meant for _it,_ ” Janet called, “I can’t get near it!” And indeed, the golem guarded the wreck of its head most zealously, screeching and nearly grabbing her whenever she thought she might have an opening. “And I’m not sure what these words are supposed to look like, Donald – I can’t see any English written on it!”

“It’s Hebrew – you’re looking for, oh, it will look like a Greek _chi_ , right above that lump that might be a nose,” Donald told her urgently, as he reached Anthony’s motionless form. Not entirely motionless, the doctor confirmed a moment later – Anthony did breathe; he was bleeding from a scrape along the side of his own head, but his skull was not dented in and did not appear cracked: his wards had protected him that much. But whether they had protected him from that a blow directly to his chest was another matter. His breathing was regular enough, but far too shallow; and Donald could not manage to determine if there was instability in the ribs or sternum, for the golden wards might as well have been plate armour in that respect; he could not physically touch the man except at a distance. All he could do was roll him into a position to better support cracked ribs.

“J’vis?” Anthony mumbled, and immediately something within Donald eased. If Anthony was already coming around –

The sound of more crystal cracking reminded him sharply that they almost certainly needed his help – badly. “Anthony? Lord Stark? Do you know where you are?” he asked.

“I – oh, Darkness,” Anthony swore, coming more fully alert and immediately being seized by a fit of coughing. “Ow,” he gasped, when he managed to force himself to a stop. “Ow – oh, Light, what is that?”

His voice rose rather shrilly at the end – and when Donald looked up, hearing the same sounds as must undoubtedly caught the High Wizard’s attention, he found himself sharing the sentiment. Coming down the stairs, trundling along the broken, darkened crystal that the golem had destroyed, was... not quite a cockroach. Not quite an ant. It was something between the two, and it was fully two feet long in length.

And behind it were dozens more, with _even more_ coming. They stepped down to the landing two or three at a time and scuttled forward – Anthony had frozen, his face a rictus of horror; Donald snatched up his walking stick and prepared to defend his injured patient. But the insects clicked and clacked right by them, moving at top speed to swarm up to the golem. It roared, lashing out and squashing a half-dozen, sending ichor flying everywhere.

“Oh, good thinking!” said Janet, swooping down at its head. The golem, trying to squash the insects crawling _up_ it, did not react to the returned threat from above until it was too late; it swept its arm upward, but Janet had already reached the rune, and threw out her hands - and with them, a thimble-sized bucket full of toxic paint. It splashed over the aleph and destroyed it.

The golem gave a wheezing sigh and went still. For a few moments, Light bled from the spell-circuits, fading into the air – and then it, too, was gone. Almost immediately the shiny granite of its form began to dull, the Dark taking its toll. The enormous insects swarmed over its corpse triumphantly.

“These are wonderful,” said Hank, from his opposite position on the floor. His transmutation spells glittered with power about his head. “I need to bring back specimens. I need to bring back _live_ specimens! It’s not at all like talking to ants, these have a much more formal... _thought process_ – I wouldn’t call it more complicated, but – ”

“Darling, can you keep a hold over them for much longer?”

“Oh, sure, I could do it for – ”

“Oh, let’s not,” said Anthony, looking like he was about to be ill – although that might have been the hit he took to his head.

“I would have to concur,” said Donald.

“I didn’t say I would,” said Henry indignantly. “Darkness, I wouldn’t have done this sort of thing if it hadn’t been urgent – I’ve disturbed their natural habitat terribly.” As he spoke, the transmutation spells clicked and chittered as well... or were the other three imagining that? But the enormous insects began to retreat towards the stairs, en masse and peaceably enough; and both Anthony and Donald breathed more easily when they had gone. “I _do_ want to take a few specimens back with me – although I shall settle for dead ones, for now.” This last was said in a very tight voice; he had attempted to stand and make his way toward them Donald and Anthony – no doubt for the specimen jars in the baggage they were carrying – and in doing so discovered all over again that his arm was badly broken.

“Well, we’ve enough dead ones for that,” Janet said ruefully, surveying the mess that the broken golem had made of them before it had died. The floor was covered in squished corpses and ichor. “Magic-absorbing spell-circuits! Hank, have you ever seen the like?” As she spoke she flitted over to his side, placing a calming, tiny hand on his cheek – and assessing the break herself. In other circumstances she’d have cried for Donald to come at once – but Donald was speaking to Anthony in low tones, and with the hit that Anthony had taken, it could not be argued that a broken arm should take precedence – no matter how much she wished it could!

“Yes,” said Henry, glad for the distraction and the comforting presence of his wife; his gaze went distant as he looked into the past. “Some would-be-Magistrar’s paper many years ago – I stumbled across it in the archives. It was all theoretical, though. She couldn’t break the essential impossibility of where the magic was supposed to _go_.” He turned calculating, lowering his voice. “Perhaps we might ask Anthony.”

Janet stroked his cheek and asked, her voice low enough not to carry, “Caught that, did you?”

He smiled at her, turning to kiss her hand – or rather, in the direction of her hand; she was far too small for him to kiss much else other than air. “I’ve not your mind for social politics, Jan, but I’m not _blind_.”

“Doctor, I can stand under my own power – I need neither your hovering nor your drugs,” said the subject of their discussion, more than loudly enough to interrupt. Indeed, the High Wizard was standing, although he remained very pale, and the blood caked across one side of his face did him no favours either.

“Powered by your own magic, I am sure,” Donald retorted, “but could you walk without the aid of your spells?”

“It is all the same for this purpose,” declared Anthony through gritted teeth. “I can move myself. Off you go – Henry has a broken arm, remember?”

Donald threw up his hands and went to attend the other Magistar.

By the time that Henry’s arm was set, splinted, and encased in a transmuted cast that would grant him nearly as much mobility as a perfectly healthy arm, Anthony had regained something of his calm; and Janet, although she did not regret staying to distract her husband from the pain of it – especially since he, too, had refused any pain-relieving drugs, and in their current location she could not find herself fully arguing against that – she did wonder if they had lost an opportunity in allowing Anthony to regain his mental footing. But the beads of sweat upon his brow gave lie to his presentation of control. 

“We should press onward,” said Anthony at last, when Donald had pronounced the cast satisfactory and Henry had returned to his tiny size – with a sigh of relief for the lessened strain of the Darkwards. The statement was ridiculous; Anthony had at least taken the opportunity to clean away the blood from his face, but it was as clear to Janet’s eyes as it was to Donald’s that he was only staying upright by his armouring wards: he _had_ been injured. “We must be near the bottom of the Tower, now – street-level. If we can venture outside, then the size and layouts of the streets may be enough to tell me where we are without maps, and from there we shall be able to draw up a list of places to search.”

“You are assuming the work of the stonegnomes has not altered the streets of York beyond all recognition,” Donald pointed out in a low, irritated rumble. Anthony was right in one thing, Janet decided privately – Donald _did_ hover, and not in the same way that she did!

“We found safe haven in the entryway here,” said Janet. “I’d much prefer to return there and rest – and then search the rest of this Tower. There may be other places to search out there, but we already know there is one right _here_.”

“Work outward and report back to a base?” Henry made a motion that might have been a shrug, but quickly aborted it to squeeze at Janet’s hand instead – they were both sitting on one of Donald’s broad shoulders. “It makes sense, Anthony. Ants do it.”

“Certainly, we should all look for wisdom from insects,” snapped Anthony.

“Better than going off half-cocked!” Janet replied smartly. “We’ve enough mysteries right here – what was that golem?” she demanded. “Spell-circuitry designed to absorb magic – is _that_ in House Stark’s grimoires?”

“You know I can’t answer that,” said Anthony, scrubbing a hand across his brow. “You’ve – perhaps a point. Something like that... if it were set to guard...”

“We should examine that lab again, then,” said Janet. “Conveniently, that is also upward. Shall we go?”

Their trek back up the stair was a weary one, made more so for the lack of Light bursting under their feet; none of them had known how much they’d become accustomed to the additional Light until it was there no more, but even had they not been flying – Anthony in no condition not to, and Donald with his leg – the stairs had been shattered and broken by the golem’s fall. They hurried past the door that had been drained of all Light, each doing their best to think of anything but the beings Grommet had warned them of, and reached the top of the stair in good time.

“Back into the Dark,” Janet murmured, facing the open door. “Oh, Hank, when we are above again, you are taking me to New Orleans and I am going sunbathing.”

“I’ve no objection to that,” Henry replied, and they stared at each other lovingly until Donald coughed loudly enough to remind them that they were sitting upon his shoulder.

“Upward first,” Janet spoke, blushing prettily – for although she had no patience for Society’s strict rules, it was perhaps different to be discussing such a thing practically within the ear of a friend. “Anthony – it’s been a difficult enough fight. We could all use a bit more Light before stepping beyond.”

“True, but...” Anthony said, drifting through the doorway and into the Darkness. The point of Light at his wrist seemed very small. “You were right, when you spoke of the golem – it would make a powerful guardian. So what was it guarding...?”

“Difficult to tell, in all this wreckage,” Donald noted, following only reluctantly – Anthony had released the flight spells upon him, allowing him the dignity of choosing his own movement.

“Hmm,” said Anthony. “But we _do_ have some better idea of what to look _for_.” He picked his way around the uneven terrain, until at last he came to a peculiar collection of rock. “Does this not look familiar to you?”

Janet alighted from Donald’s shoulder, winging her way over; the doctor and Henry followed across a more laborious route. “You’re right,” she said, after inspecting it for a few moments. “The shape of this... it was broken first, a bit, but it’s another golem.” Four enormous limbs, sprawled in death – the cause of which was obvious: it was lacking a head.

“I shouldn’t like to meet whatever blasted it,” Henry said as Donald reached a point wherefrom they could both see the enormous stone corpse. “Or was it struck by physical might - ? No, there isn’t enough damage about here.”

“How would you know if there was?” Donald asked, and though he was genuinely curious there was nonetheless a dry note to the question.

“A fair point,” Henry conceded. “I wish I knew more about that spell-circuitry! Why, it held Light, like everything else not corroded in this place.”

“Including the doors,” said Anthony. He had been turning between examining the golem and examining the nearest wall; and now he raised a hand and launched an explosive bolt toward it – it cracked in a vaguely rectangular shape, as if remembering the weak points of the doorway that might once have been there. “Someone did this... they did not enter from the stair. It must have been outside. They attempted multiple entrances...”

“Or several some _things_ did it,” Henry pointed out. “It has been a hundred years.”

“The floor was dark in the entranceway,” said Janet thoughtfully. “But the stair was yet concealed, and the room intact. This someone could teleport, then – by haemomancy or other means. And this is...” she trailed after Anthony as he stalked through the doorway he’d blasted. “This is... an octagon?”

“What?” Henry stood up upon Donald’s shoulder, all but jumping up and down with impatience. “Let me see. Lights and stars, Anthony, what obsession did your ancestor have with eights? Everyone knows that sevens are far stronger – the Seven Cities, seven schools of magic, seven years of training, seven primary transforms – eight isn’t even as decent as six, it’s so symmetrical it’s _useless_ – ”

“Yes, thank you, I’m quite aware,” Anthony said. He’d raised his bracelet and brightened the Light upon it enough to reach all corners of the – indeed, octagonal – room; although perhaps it might not have been a perfect octagon once: two walls were missing large portions of their middle, one leading to another room, another looking out onto a void of Darkness beyond. There was not much in the room itself – a few older lumps of the grey stone, an octagonal depression in the center of the floor, and two square stone pedestals sitting on opposing sides of the depression. The rubble from the broken walls – except the one that Anthony had broken – had scattered outward instead.

“Whatever purpose this room had, it must have been important,” said Janet, flying down near to one of the square pedestals. “Look – the impression of giant feet! These are where those golems were, then. So. Was it the golems who were important – or were they merely the guardians?” She landed upon the pedestal and expanded her own Darkwards to cover it, a red cube, before attempting a basic divination. Her eyes popped open. “This change is very recent. Perhaps not a week old.”

“I fear for our chances if whatever did it comes back!” said Donald, looking at the exploded walls.

“So do I,” said Henry, looking as though he’d rather not have admitted it. “We brought down the one through its ingrained weakness, but that other was felled by – what? Overloading the spell circuits? I can think of no other way to get around such a setup, but the power required for that...”

“Presents something of a problem, to be sure, but is not insurmountable,” Anthony said grimly, stepping down into the central depression. He pulled from a pocket his spell-stone – and hesitated, for a long moment. “I think I know this set-up – and if I am right, then those _golems_ were certainly the guardians, and not the treasure.” He pronounced the name of the creatures with a peculiar emphasis – one that hinted at horror. But when Janet might have questioned, she was distracted by his next words: “I believe this to be the anchor-room. And yet the anchor is _missing_.”

“And the golems were destroyed only days ago. Oh, no.” Janet flew upwards, hovering at head height. “You think something came here and stole it?”

“Are you sure it’s the anchor-room?” Henry asked, half-skeptically, half-desperately.

Anthony laughed. “Reasonably. The requirements for it were well-described in the surviving notes.” He waved his free hand at the walls around them. “And then... well. There is this.” He held up the blue stone. “As you’ve probably realized by now, it happens to... react to the presence of Dweomer-driven magic, and it’s been bothering me since we entered the Tower. But here, standing _right_ here – ” he levelled the stone with the exact center of the octagon, closing his eyes. “Yes,” he said, his voice barely more than a murmur. “A very great deal of Dweomeric power has been passed down to this point over a great many years. And yet now it is fading...”

“So. Something broke in – perhaps multiple times, perhaps not – defeated two golems with raw power, then stole the anchor,” Donald summarized. “Then our worst fears _are_ true. The anchor has been moved. How long do the Seven Cities have?”

“Mga. Danvers won’t be finished with her new anchor for months,” said Janet worriedly. “Anthony. If we recover the anchor, move it back here – ”

“Assuming that whomever it is hasn’t just destroyed it,” interjected Henry.

“ – I don’t think so,” Anthony said, looking upward. He hesitated as he spoke, choosing each word with care; he looked pale and sick beside the Light upon his wrist. “After all, the anchor is yet tied to the Dweomer...”

“...and so whoever holds it may be able to tap into the Dweomer, too,” Henry finished. “Damn! As if whoever, whatever it is does not already have power enough, to blast away those golems like that. Could _you_ do such a thing, Anthony? You said you had ‘something like it’ to power your own spells.” Henry was speculating, now.

As was his wife. But Janet was Lady Van Dyne as well as Magistra, and her thoughts ran along different lines, for from her cradle she had dealt with powerful lords and ladies – keeping secrets, one and all. And in Henry’s words was an unknowing echo. The last piece of her puzzle fell into place. She stifled a gasp, her mind recoiling from the answer – and yet – “Something like that... not just you. You said that you were certain _Zola_ had something like it, a hundred years ago.”

“Zola lived a hundred years ago, Van Dyne,” Anthony said coolly. “Despite what the common populace would believe about necromancy, it’s not _actually_ capable of extending one’s own life. It’s powered by _death_ , after all.”

“You sound sure of that.”

“I’m sure you’re aware that Howard I fought against Zola. He left notes.”

“So the question is,” mused Henry, “Did he have apprentices?”

“How could they have survived down here without Darkwards?” Anthony asked, with the air of one posing a rhetorical question. “And believe you me – I know every person in the Cities who can cast them. No one was hiding up above.”

“Well, it wasn’t some mindless monster out of the Dark,” Donald spoke up. When Henry and Janet both turned to him, he gave something approximating a sheepish, one-armed shrug. “From all your words, this theft sounds _planned_. That does not happen without a mind to plan it.”

“Donald, were you a thief back when?” Henry asked, jokingly surprised. The tension eased.

Donald coughed. “I did say that when I first awoke, I had few skills and fewer resources to aid me – as did my rescuers. And in those days... they were different times.” His voice grew sombre as he spoke.

“Doctor, sailor, thief,” said Anthony. “I suppose you did say you had tried many careers.” As he spoke, he fiddled with his blue gem, and the glow from it increased; sweat broke out upon his brow. “Aha! I think our thief is still close enough... that I may yet be able to track him.” He glanced at the hole in the outer wall. “And that seems the quickest way to follow.”

“Hold a moment, Anthony,” said Janet, and although she used his familiar name, her voice was cold. “There are gaps here you are not explaining.”

Anthony looked at her with tired eyes, and mopped sweat away from his face with his sleeve. “You know that I cannot speak of specifics when it comes to the Dweomer, Janet.”

“That hasn’t stopped you from dropping hints, the more off-balance you become,” she retorted. “And you have been perpetually off-balance since we set foot inside this Tower – why?”

“I didn’t expect to find anything down here still preserved,” he said, glancing about the room. “Perhaps... it would have been easier if it had all decayed to stone.”

Janet’s eyes narrowed. “No. You are evading.”

He threw up his hands. “What would you have me say? I cannot speak of it!”

“Why did the thief need to steal the anchor?”

“I assume for the link to the Dweomer.”

“Yes, that was your first thought, wasn’t it? But why does this theft sicken you so?”

“The capacitance of the Cities’ levitation spells is immense, but hardly infinite. If the spells are not carefully adjusted – and I assure you, the thief has not done so – then they _will_ collapse, unless we restore the anchor.”

“Then we must do so without delay,” said Donald firmly. “Lady Janet, where are you taking this?”

Janet ignored him. “You are hiding a lie behind truth, Anthony – yes, that is terrible, but your concern is for the link to the Dweomer – there! Your expression gives you away.”

He looked sourly at her – as sourly as he could, given that sweat stood out upon his chalk-white face. “ _Leave_ this, Janet.”

“Jan, he can’t hear this. The House Oaths,” began Henry, but Janet shook her head.

“No, he never _said_ they were so restrictive as that – simply asked us to drop it, as friends might. Yet he could discuss haemomancy freely enough – a shadowed art in itself, but not considered important enough to bind.” Her voice was hard and cold; Anthony closed his eyes with a look of weary resignation. “You’ve not been quite yourself since we entered this Tower, Anthony – is it because of the spell-circuitry? I see how it disgusts you – hardly fitting, given its wonder. Hank speculated it was charged up by the Dweomer – was that true?”

“Van Dyne, I can’t give you answers.”

“You already have,” she said flatly. “Your guilt is written all over your face.” Anthony flinched. “You’ve not been yourself since we entered here – is there too much horror here, even for you?”

“Jan – ” tried Henry, but she silenced him with a glare – half anger, and half hurt. He raised his hands. “Alright, but I wish you’d get to the point.”

“What are you chasing after, good lady?” Donald asked. “We are all upon edge in these Dark depths; remember your own words to me. We must not turn against each other.”

“His concern with the theft of the anchor is not, primarily, for the effect upon the levitation spells,” said Janet. Her voice was cold; she spoke with the authority and judgement of the Lady who ruled the most powerful mercantile house in New York. “He is concerned about access to the Dweomer – to a great well of power... of which, he states, Arnim Zola had a similar source. For too long have we ignored the question of what House _Stark’s_ source is. Consider this octagonal room – located in one of eight Towers, to house an anchor with an octagonal base. As Hank asked you, Lord Stark... why is your House so obsessed with eights? Magic is life – it is stifled by too much symmetry, too much order. That is why eights are so useless... unless the magic in question is not concerned with _life_ at all. Unless it is so unnatural, so sickened, that it _requires_ the imposition of external balance. You are so certain that Zola had a source similar to the Dweomer... because you know what the Dweomer truly is. You look at the spell-circuitry with disgust because you know what was used to power it. You speak with so much surety on necromancers, High Wizard, because you _are_ one.”

There was a moment of silence, when Anthony might have denied the accusation – where he might have provided an alternative explanation, and had it been carefully worded, even Janet might have accepted it. But instead he raised his head with a shuddering sigh. “What would you have me say, Jan?” he asked, voice strained. “I can still explain nothing more to you than before.”

“You do not deny it, then.” The voice that said this was like rolling thunder; the other three turned to Donald in surprise at its depth, for it carried more weight than the doctor had ever before leant his words. Nor was it merely the doctor’s words; from beneath his white-knuckled grip on his walking stick, the wood was beginning to smoke Light. Henry, seeing it, hopped from Donald’s shoulder in alarm, and grew until his head brushed the ceiling.

“I certainly can’t confirm it,” said Anthony quietly, taking a small step back and crooking his fingers. He could have defensive – or offensive – spells ready in an instant... or possibly something worse.

“And if you raise wards or cast spells now,” said Janet, flying between them, “will you be doing it with our lives? Have you been doing so all along? You said you didn’t have the Dweomer with you – just _something similar._ ” Betrayal showed openly on her face, now; there were no more masks.

Anthony looked at her in horror. “No! I have not – I wouldn’t!” he protested, dropping the spells that had been forming at his fingertips. “I swear it!”

“The oath of a necromancer,” Donald said, his voice hard. “What would a practitioner of the Black School know of honour? Do you know of the suffering caused by the Chaos Wars?” The wood of his staff creaked beneath the strain his grip was exerting upon it. “Armies of corpses, swarming encampments in the night! The starvation of entire towns, their suffering to serve as fuel for those unholy fires! Children taken and slain, then sent back to their families to bring death-rot! These dark arts are practice of the blackest souls!”

His anger was a palpable thing; motes of Light danced in the air. They went unnoticed before his rage. Anthony looked small before the might of it: a mortal, weary and frail. His words were quiet. “Would you have me abandon the office of High Wizard? Then you must first tell me of a way that, within the Seven Schools, one may keep thirty billion tonnes suspended in air – because I don’t know of any.” He paused. “And good Doctor, your walking stick is glowing.”

Taken off-guard by the first declaration, the latter statement caused Donald to look away, down at the stick – which was indeed glowing, although even as he watched the glow faded to nothing; the motes about him faded with the charge of his anger.

“So,” said Henry into the silence. “The Dweomer is necromancy. The Cities are kept aloft by the deaths of our own citizens.” He shook his head wearily. “Just when I thought this entire situation could not get more nightmarish. The Light knows that I have had my fair share of bad judgement, but this, Anthony... is there a cavern of corpses buried somewhere beneath Stark Manor? Or do you simply drop them out the bottom of the city, let them rot in the Dark?”

“Thirty billion tonnes,” said Anthony, choosing his words with obvious care; he seemed reluctant to speak at all. “You’re thinking far too small-scale. Everything dies in the end.”

“So it’s not individual murder – you harvest all of us,” said Henry, the words dripping with disgust. “To think I once envied you.”

“Then how would you do it?” Anthony demanded. “You didn’t even think it was possible. Tell me, should I denounce my House, destroy the Dweomer, and let the Dark claim us all? If I’ve sold my soul then that’s no concern of yours, except that it has allowed humanity to live on these past nine years I’ve held office!”

“And if House Stark had swallowed its pride and gone to the University a hundred years ago – put this problem before the brightest minds of the entire city instead of keeping it to themselves – then perhaps you would not still be taking a tax of life from every citizen,” Jan pointed out coolly. “How many years do we lose, Anthony? Five? Fifteen?”

“Well. As Magistra Danvers will have no loyalty-oaths binding her, upon reading the letters I have left her she may do whatever she likes with the knowledge,” said Anthony carelessly.  His lips quirked into something that might, by a deaf stonegnome, be called a smile. “But I fear she won’t have the chance to do that if we don’t recover the anchor, and quickly.”

Henry and Janet paled. “You mean – ” Janet’s hands clenched into fists. “If it can take some years, surely it can take them all. You could drain the lives of every citizen of the Flying Cities.”

Anthony did not contradict her; instead he walked to the edge of the room and looked out into the gulf of Darkness beyond. “If the anchor isn’t realigned, they’ll all be dead soon no matter what else the thief does. The anchor must be returned in any case.”

Donald stepped up beside him; his walking stick made heavy thumps against the stone as he placed it down with each step, and his voice was heavy as well, thick with grief. “In those first years... decades... so many died, of so many _preventable_ causes. Everyone thought it the lack of Paladins and their healing hands... but it was not simply that, was it? The cities were not so populous, then – would the tax upon each soul have been higher?” He shook his head bleakly. “House Stark will not avoid a reckoning for this treachery.”

“I know,” Stark said quietly. Spell-light, lines of white fire, spilled out from around his hands, lifting both him and Donald from the ground; Janet grabbed hold of Henry, who was rapidly losing size, and flew him up to Donald’s shoulder.

And then there was nothing for it but to step over the edge.


	4. The Deeper Dark

They dropped downward as one company, a tiny point of Light in the Darkness: feelings of betrayal were yet ruled by practicality. Their only reference was the outer wall of Stark Tower. If columns built by stonegnomes loomed some ways off, then there was no way for any of them to tell; Stark did not fire off any flares, and none of the others suggested that he do so.

Yet after they had dropped perhaps two hundred yards, the Darkness, if anything, thickened around them. For the three magistrars the world gained a reddish haze as their Darkwards turned more solid than they had ever yet been, and all three of them shuddered in unison – any might have spoken, opened dry mouths to croak, “Up, go,” except for Donald’s presence... and the Light beginning once more to surround his walking stick and dance in the air. Not merely motes, now: sparks occasionally crackled between his fingertips.

They hit the bottom perhaps fifty yards later. For the first time, the ground was not the bland, uniformly grey stone as before: this was pitted with some sort of corrosion, and shot through with blackened cracks. Stark’s Light, which had pushed back the Darkness by an easy thirty yards in the Greydark, now required five times the effort to allow them all to see a mere ten feet. He gripped the Dweomer-stone tighter, and poured ten times the power into it – Light rolled outward and over a tall, stooping figure with limbs too long and slender for its body.

Eight times, then. The sphere of Light shrank.

“Give me a minute,” Stark murmured, inspecting the Dweomer-stone. It floated up between his hands, caught between nets of occasionally-visible spell-lines – divination, Henry would have wagered, watching him. But perhaps something else.

Henry looked away, and occupied himself with a different puzzle instead. “You’re glowing again,” he observed to Donald. His voice was small, smaller than it should have been, and he cleared his throat self-consciously.

Donald looked down at himself with a doctor’s critical eye, but of course, like Henry, he was unable to see the most alarming change – the small sparks of Light that crackled within his pupils, soundlessly and apparently painlessly as well. Janet, however, was fully able to appreciate this development; she flew up to hang in the air in front of his face, inspecting him. “Has your vision changed?” she asked. Like Henry, she, too, sounded... small, although of the same pitch and volume as before. But compared to the suffocating Darkness around them...

“No, save that – ” Donald cut himself off before he could think too long about the glimpse of the figure he’d seen before Stark had shrunk their circle of Light inward. “No, why?”

“Your eyes are changing,” she answered. Then, in a more gentle tone: “Have you remembered anything else? Above, you spoke as if...” her own eyes slid sideways to glance at Stark, but he was presenting a facade of obliviousness. “It sounded as though you remembered the War.”

“This way,” Stark murmured, not looking up from his work.

They all stepped carefully: the ground was uneven. Every so often, they passed a long, slender pole – Stark aimed the Light up near one, but was only five or six yards high. A lamp-post, perhaps. Had this then been a street? The thoroughfares of old York were said have been grand, wide roads.

“I spoke without thinking,” Donald said. His voice was quiet; but there was some quality about it that was not made small by the oppressive Dark, and both Janet and Henry leaned in to listen to him speak. “I... I am not sure. It was as if my anger was not merely my own.”

After a few yards, they encountered a wall; when Stark carefully directed Light further along it, it revealed regular imprints that might once have been windows – and one, a door. A slender form stood not far past it, head tilted.

Stark dropped the Light back closer to them. “The path leads through. We may either break this wall – and possibly whatever lies beyond it – or follow it around. We appear to be on an open street; we should be able to circle around.”

“Through,” said Janet uneasily.

“It would seem best,” said Donald.

“Either blast it open or I shall transmute it,” said Henry, staring off to the side. A slender, shadow-made hand was reaching out from the darkness, elongated fingers curved in a bend with one too many joints.

“Focus, Hank,” Janet commanded him. “What was the social structure of that colony of insects?”

“Well,” said Henry, eagerly bending his mind to any thought that might consume his attention. But the others were spared a lengthy lecture, for Stark summoned a bright bolt of power and hurled it at the door-shaped impression; it exploded inward, mostly at the weak points, and his Light shone through to illuminate the interior. Stark stepped inside quickly, Donald fast on his heels – and not quite managing to avoid looking back, a frown upon his face.

“Keep thinking,” Stark muttered, staring down at the Dweomer-stone like it held the world’s answers. He crossed the room – it was pitted with heaps that might once have been furniture – and blew open another door. This time, it led to a hallway.

“I’m moving the insects,” Henry muttered, his gaze going far away. “I think we may need the help with this thief, if they’re living down here.”

A silent figure appeared out of the darkness at the end of the hallway. Stark did not look up from the Dweomer-stone; he marched straight past. Donald did as well, his eyes lowered, fixed upon where Light leaked out from beneath his grip on his walking-stick. The figure loomed over them, tall and spindly, but did not move, except to turn its face to watch their passage.

“When I first woke I knew nothing,” said Donald quietly to Janet. She made a humming noise, but it was not entirely apparent that she was paying him full attention. The doctor took no offense at this, however; he was well aware that a good half of his own inward-searching was done in the name of distraction. “There was only the sense of great loss – of failure. But that was hardly something to set me apart from humanity. Six cities had been raised by then, but they were all still too crowded; the mages had only just discovered spells to expand them without breaking apart, but they required intense labour to prepare. Far too many died at it. In the slums it was even worse. Human beings lived so closely together that sickness ran rampant – with some help, I suppose.” He glared at Stark, ahead of them; but the High Wizard gave no sign he had heard.

“But they were kind, even then.” The memory of humanity’s grace... he almost regretted the realization that he was not of them. He could not pretend to be, not any more – but recalling those he had known... the grace of humanity under pressure was truly a thing to behold. The loss of that tie was a blow, more than any fear of his true, unknown heritage. “I was accepted, there – I was not the only one who dreamt of monstrous horrors. Even if I could barely recall them upon waking, there were others who recalled similar things – the horrors of the War.” His voice dropped to a murmur. “But now I remember ...”

“So you _were_ a soldier?” Janet asked, still only half attentive.

“I must have been.” Donald shook his head. “Much is still unclear.” The horrors of necromancy, certainly – and the sickening stench of a battlefield after the slaughter. But further memory teased at his mind, almost _there_... and then dancing away like a wisp of fog when he tried to grab it.

Stark blew open another door, ruining his concentration entirely.

They stepped out. Above, there was no roof that Stark’s Light revealed. “Likely another street,” said Stark, raising his head for the first time. He stepped forward, and the bubble of Light around him revealed two shadowy figures standing, heads tilted toward each other – but facing the party. A frisson of fear ran through him at the sight of more than one of the creatures, but he suppressed it ruthlessly.

Perhaps not ruthlessly enough. Or perhaps it was one of the others; in the end there was no way to know. Both heads straightened, and the Walkers raised arms, reaching slowly for them.

Stark pulled in the Light and stepped quickly sideways, walking along the wall of the building they’d passed through instead of straight out from it.

“The insects are almost here,” said Henry distantly. “I think – ”

Stark and Donald stopped short. In front of them stood three Walkers, slowly raising their arms but not moving forward.

“Time to fly,” said Stark, wrapping the spells about himself and Donald and lifting them into the air. The ground dropped away quickly – but slender hands reached out of the Darkness after them, and no sooner had they pulled out of reach than a roof appeared above their heads. A hand of shadow reached out from the black-streaked stone. He flew back from it, and the roof opened up – had it been a walkway? One built by humans, or by stonegnomes?

But something stood atop it, now – many somethings – and the roof closed in again, barely ten feet higher than before; in front of them, it lowered again. They were cut off from even the meagre elevation afforded to them in the Tower: trapped within the Deeper Dark.

“The quiet approach isn’t working,” said Donald grimly, raising his walking stick like a weapon. “We are going to have to fight.”

“We just need to stop _thinking_ of the blasted things!” snapped Stark, dropping downward and picking up speed toward his intended destination – he had to dodge upward again as a shadow-figure appeared on the street and reached for Donald with much greater speed than before. It was as if the things were slowly becoming more awake. “We’re so close – ”

“And then we can take two foes on at once?” said Janet. “That’s a terrible idea.” Two walkers paced them now, one on either side – not reaching out, but easily, languidly, keeping speed. Janet ducked away from the nearest. “We overcame the fog demon and the golem – it is time to see if we can take these foes as well. Either that, or we must hide until they go away, and we do not have time.”

Stark cursed, and dropped them all to the ground.

“Hank, you have your insects,” ordered Janet, as the pair flanking them were joined by four more. “Get them here – we must have no physical contact. Spells only. Donald – ”

The doctor’s eyes were crackling with Light. “Do not fear for me, Janet.”

“Then I shan’t,” she said, and dropped down beneath a Walker’s hand that was suddenly _there_ , reaching out to touch her. She returned with a blast laced with Light – to seemingly no effect; the Walker raised its hand, turning it over as if to inspect it, then reached for her again.

Behind her, facing the other way, Stark tucked the Dweomer-stone in his front pocket and summoned a blast that vapourized the three Walkers in front of him – and left everyone blinking, light-blinded. “Warn us when you do that!” howled Henry, rubbing at his eyes. “Blast it, I’ve lost them...” His own transmutation spells flared again, and he began muttering to the insects, aloud this time.

“Necromancy,” whispered Janet to herself, and she poured enough power into her next burst to turn the hand reaching for her into nothing more than wisps of shadow. She ducked the wisps anyway – and beside her, Donald’s walking stick cracked down and around, trailing sparks of Light – until it was caught by a hand of pure Darkness.

Donald stared upward into a face without feature – a form defined only by its complete absence of illumination. Then he gritted his teeth and pulled backward, freeing his walking stick, and with a burst of speed brought it about and buried it in where the Walker’s stomach would be – if it had one. It bent inward slightly, the barest registration of the blow – and then dealt him one in return that knocked him clear of Stark’s sphere of Light.

“No!” cried Janet.

Stark raised the hand with the bracelet and threw power into it. The sphere of Light expanded, rolling over dozens of tall, slender forms surrounding them – three were bending toward Donald, who was getting to his feet, eyes flashing. He brought his walking stick above and over and smashed in the head of the nearest Walker, the stick releasing a fountain of Light. Two more reached for him and were treated similarly, but not without cost; another got a grip about his wrist, and Donald let out a roar of pain.

“Only this many?” Stark asked, breathing hard; both he and Janet were ducking Walkers themselves. He pushed the Light out further, past the edges of the crowding forms – and for the first time revealing a limit to their numbers. Yet what numbers they were! Janet, flitting up above his head in time to blast another Walker from an advantaged angle, stared at them aghast. Hundreds of yards away, a massive, chittering carpet was moving toward them – insect re-enforcements. But they were moving far too slow. “This, I can do.”

“You are insane.”

“Well, you know what they say about Starks,” he said, throwing her a grin that looked downright ghoulish beneath the blood-red Darkwards. He brought his hands close together again, and between them began to burn a brightness that forced her to look away. “Make sure you’re behind me for this – I think I’ll need at least three shots.”

Donald was fighting his way back towards them; Janet flew to help him, serving more as a distraction than anything else, but providing a great deal of aid nonetheless. “Hank, Hank,” she said, “If his mad plan doesn’t work, we need those insects here faster.”

“They’re fighting me,” said Henry, his face dotted with sweat. “They’ve worked out I’m not part of their hive – I’ve got them for now, but – no! No, no, I’m one of your queens, do what I say – ”

“Cover your eyes!”

Stark tossed his spell forward. For the second time in as many days, a Light not unlike the Sun Above burned through the Darkness – so bright it burned even through Janet and Henry’s closed eyelids. They blinked rapidly as they lowered their hands, taking in what was in front of them. The sphere of Light was beginning to reduce to a more reasonable radius, but it nonetheless revealed a wide gap in the ranks of the Walkers. Those remaining drew back a few paces – but only a few. A protective shield covering their party from the front – Stark’s work – flickered out as he began summoning another miniature Sun. He stepped by Donald to get in front of him – and stumbled.

“Stark?” Donald asked, grabbing his elbow to support him.

“I’m fine,” Stark gasped, although it was evident to all that he was not.

“You’re magicked out,” said Janet.

“I’ve lost them!” groaned Henry, burying his head in his hands.

“I’ve got the Dweomer, I’m fine,” said Stark, pulling his arm away and letting the Light grow.

It was bright enough that Jan had to avert her face again, but his plain lie was enough to make her say with alarm, “That’s not what you said before – ”

The light went out. Janet turned back to him – Stark had gone as white as a sheet. One hand came up to clutch at his chest, and he sank to his knees – would have fallen to them, if Donald had not caught him.

A Walker moved forward.

“No!” thundered Donald, and he stepped forward, slamming his walking stick against the ground. A roll of Light raced like lightning out from beneath it; the Walker stumbled, the motion seeming strangely inelegant for the creature, and Donald whipped his stick about and smashed it through the Walker’s chest.

Stark’s Darkwards flickered, fading rapidly; he fell to hands-and-knees, and then collapsed. Henry leaped from Donald’s shoulder, abandoning all hope of controlling his insects, and instead cast his own Darkwards about Stark – and not a moment too soon; Stark’s died at once. The Light collapsed in on them and vanished, leaving Donald a glowing figure alone in the Darkness.

Janet cast her own Light at once. “No, no, no, you didn’t, you _idiot,”_ she chastised the unconscious High Wizard, before swallowing and readying her own evocation spells. The Walkers were moving to surround them again – and she did not have enough power for blasts such as she truly needed against these creatures. The decision to challenge them had been a foolish one.

Donald stumbled as a blow forced him momentarily onto his bad leg, and caught sight of their situation. With a cry, he surged upward, and cracked a Walker across its non-existent face. “Go! I’ll draw them in and hold them off.”

“We’re not going abandon you,” said Henry, rising and growing to ten feet tall – although the effort it cost him from the Darkwards was immediately apparent. He lashed out at an approaching Walker with his new, extended reach – and screamed in pain, doubling over as Janet came to his rescue, blasting its head to smoke. 

“You _must_ restore the anchor,” said Donald. “Find the thief, or warn the cities – you must survive to do so!” He glared at his foes. “You think I fear you, creatures! Come to me! You are in my thoughts, and I am not afraid!”

“Donald, no, please,” begged Janet, but even as she focused on his predicament over the Walkers around them, they began to lose interest in her – and to drift toward the besieged doctor. She harried them nonetheless, feeling her own reserves drop with each blast she managed. Oh, how foolish she had been, to think they could fight these things.  _  
_

“GO!” roared Donald, stumbling forward and away. He was surrounded almost immediately.

Henry groaned and climbed to his feet, staring after them helplessly. “Jan!”

With a frustrated scream she broke off, darting back toward them. “Go!” she shouted, and Henry picked up Stark’s still form, and ran.

They passed only a handful of Walkers during their retreat, each heading swiftly toward Donald – and then they were off of the street and into a smaller one, an alleyway perhaps, and there were no more Walkers looming out of the shadows into their little bubble of light. Behind them came a low rumbling sound, followed by an enormous, staccato thundercrack. 

“Run!” cried Henry, and Janet followed him as he ran.

 

 

Some streets later they paused at last, both panting for breath. Each was silent, struggling not to think of their friend that they had left behind – surely thinking on it would bring the Walkers down upon them again, and made his sacrifice in vain.

Henry set Stark upon the ground and shrank himself down with a groan. “Forgive me, Jan, but I need a rest. The Darkwards are so much harder to maintain this far down!”

“I feel it too,” Janet said, shaking her head. She landed and stilled her wings, listening intently. “I can’t hear anything – although everything in this place is far too good at being silent anyway.”

“I know,” said Henry glumly. Now small enough, he jumped up onto Stark’s still form and pressed his ear to the other man’s chest. Stark’s heartbeat was slow – abnormally slow, Henry thought, and the rise and fall of his chest too shallow. But they had no doctor – no. Henry could not let himself think of that.

“Stupid,” Janet groaned to herself, winging up to land beside him. “Him, and us. He swore that he was not drawing from _our_ lives – how could I not have expected him to use himself all along?”

“But _necromancy_ – Jan – ” Henry shook his head. “I worked closely with Magistar Xavier, you know, developing my communication spells. We discussed, sometimes, the perils of our magicks... spells that work upon minds are so much more open to abuse – there are some that are simply _evil,_ and they warp the caster. An entire school that makes playthings of _souls_...” he trailed off, looking at the man. “I can’t simply believe he’s the same man I thought he was.”

“Perhaps,” said Janet quietly, then, “No. I know you’re right. These kinds of secrets... I wouldn’t have thought it of him. And the Dweomer... but I cannot help but wonder what I would do, in the same situation. I learned magic because it was life – these wings, because they were my passion – but his Magistration was for the _Darkwards_. All of his inventions – those weightless shields they’re using to extend New York and New Orleans with – the improvements to the cloudchasers – I think of each and I can think immediately of an application to reduce the tax of the Dweomer.” She shook her head. “Searching for a solution, or at least, a mitigation – that is the man I know.”

Henry swore softly. “Curse House Stark, and their cursed mage-oaths.”

“Yes,” agreed Jan. She stepped over to Anthony’s breast-pocket, and with some effort heaved the Dweomer-stone from it; it was more than half her height, and when she had it free she stepped away from it with a shudder. “And curse him in particular, for not realizing he’d overdone it!”

“Curse me, too,” said Henry gloomily. “I should have known... those insects’ minds were so foreign, compared to ants. Everything down here is foreign. I thought that even if I couldn’t control them, I couldn’t talk them around, but – ”

“Oh, don’t blame yourself, Hank,” said Janet, stepping away from the Dweomer-stone to take his hand and clasp it between hers. “It was my fault – I told Anthony to stand and fight. I was arrogant.” Tears formed at the corners of her eyes, and she bowed her head, half-choking on a sob. “We lost Donald.”

Henry stood at once and wrapped her in his arms. “No. Don’t think of it.” He managed a weak laugh. “Truly, do not think of it, love – we cannot afford to think of it. But it wasn’t your fault. Your logic was sound – it is – this _place_ ,” he said in distress. “We cannot win against it.”

Janet clung to him a moment longer, and then pulled back to wipe her eyes. “No. Do not speak so; we _must_ go on. The Cities depend on us – and for Donald...”

“For the Cities...” Henry rubbed wearily at his own eyes, and took her hands once more. “Jan. Light of my life. Please hear out what I am about to say, for I know you shall object, but _please_  - you must return to the Cities. Fly out of here.”

She gaped at him. “And – what, leave you and Anthony? I certainly shan’t!”

“You must. Someone must warn the cities. If they gather everyone onto cloudchasers or Anthony’s invisible walks... they may have a chance.”

“There aren’t enough cloudchasers in the cities, Hank,” Jan breathed. “We’d be saving thousands out of millions.”

“But we’d be _saving_ those thousands. Jan, please! We have to save _someone!_ ”

“No. There has to be a way – ”

“There’s no way,” said Henry, his voice dropping, passion fleeing. “I don’t have the reserves left to keep up the Darkwards on him for more than maybe half a day; far less if I have to be large enough to carry him. And you can’t tell me you’re doing any better. The thief blew apart a golem – even if we catch up, we’ll never defeat him. I can’t fly, Jan. The only person capable of returning to the surface is you – you _have_ to.”

“I’d carry you.” Her expression was numb.

“And kill Anthony the moment we left him? You could never be so cold.”

She made her hands into fists and rested them against his chest, and then her head as well; he held her in his arms as she thought furiously. “We could shrink him.”

Henry laughed incredulously. “You do remember how badly that went with the goat?”

“Between any chance and none, I’d rather save both of you!” she shouted.

Beneath their feet, the surface they were standing upon – which was to say, the High Wizard’s chest – stirred, rising with a deeper breath than before. Anthony’s head tipped to the side, and he groaned.

Janet lifted off at once, flying over and into his line of sight – although his eyes were only open to slits. She laid a tiny palm against his cheek. “Anthony?”

“Jan?” Her name came out half-slurred, and sounding quite confused. His eyes slipped shut again.

“No, we need you awake,” she said briskly, patting his cheek – and then doing so rather harder when she failed to elicit a response. “Damn – Anthony!” But it was no good.

“Go,” Henry urged her, jumping down to the floor from his previous perch. “If he wakes again more coherently, then we two can follow you. But you must go, dearest. We’re too late to find the thief – we’ve no idea how Anthony was tracking him, and I, for one, am utterly lost. The cities must be warned.”

“Then we’re both lost,” said Janet. “Figuratively and literally. So I can’t go anyway. I’ve no idea how to get out of here.” She clenched her hands into fists. “And no way to find the thief.”

Henry rubbed his head. “I can summon an individual insect from here – just one, I can do,” he said. “They’re coming from up higher – if it can find its way down here, it could find its way back. The way _up._ ”

“Then do so,” ordered Janet. “And give me Anthony’s Darkwards while you’re doing so, and then we shall _both_ find our way to higher ground.” She gave him a fierce look. “Promise me you’ll come with me that far, and I’ll fly out the rest of the way and warn the Cities.”

He smiled at her in obvious relief. “Dear Jan. Thank you.” He sat on the floor, settling against Anthony’s arm for a backrest, and began working his transmutative spells once more.

Janet sat beside him, assuming the burden of Anthony’s Darkwards from Henry; the sudden effort made her gasp and sway, and she could not have remained on her feet if she’d been standing. “It’s so much worse down here,” she said, and leaned against her husband’s side.

“Yes,” Henry agreed, if a bit distractedly, and he leaned in to her as well.

They sat like that for some time, Henry concentrating intently on an insectisoid mind at a far distance, and Janet running through derivations in her head in order to keep her mind focused and clear of unwanted thoughts; yet she also kept an alert ear ready, for they didn’t know what else might lurk down here in the Deeper Dark that the stonegnomes had never seen.

“No, no... this way... hmm,” Henry muttered aloud. He was frowning. “Why don’t you...? Let me have a sense of – oh, hum, that’s interesting...”

“Hank? What is it?”

“The insect found something,” said Hank. “A hole in the ground, and there’s some sort of heat from above and cold from below – blast, it’s so hard to get a clear picture without any vision! But I think... perhaps...” He looked desperately at his wife, as if realizing what he had just suggested.

“If there is any chance then we must take it,” said Janet. “Hank...”

“I know. I know,” he groaned, rubbing at his forehead. “This place! Give me a few more minutes – it’s not far now...”

Another five minutes passed – and then a horrid figure scuttled out of the Darkness, completely silent. It was one of the insects that had come to their rescue against the golem, but from Janet’s now-grounded point of view it seemed rather larger than it had before. She made a face, and then leaned over to kiss her husband firmly on the lips. After a startled moment – for they _were_ still leaning against the arm of their unconscious friend – he returned the kiss with enthusiasm.

“I love you,” said Janet, and then she lifted herself a few inches into the air to settle on Anthony’s chest.

“And I you,” Henry murmured, as he grew large again. The strain was very present on his face as he bent to pick up both Anthony and, by extension, Janet. “It’s not far.” To the insect, he said, “Go... yes, slowly.”

Their guide scuttled out ahead of them, a circuitous route that had Henry ducking his head numerous times. They were both strained: Henry, from the taxing effort of performing too many spells under such deep Darkness, and Janet from the almost physical urge to fling herself into the air and play scout – an urge cut short by the knowledge that to do so she would need to pass the Darkwards upon Anthony back to her husband, and that could not be allowed. It was bad enough that she might need to later, if it came down to a fight or to stealth.

“Wait,” said Henry momentarily. “I... do you see that?”

She strained her eyes forward, but saw nothing; after a moment, Henry lifted her and Anthony higher, and then she _did_ see. Far off in the midst of the Darkness shone a Light.

It was not like the Light that had clung to the pinnacle of the Stark Tower. She was not entirely sure it was like any Light she had ever seen before at all. At this distance it was faint – although it grew brighter with each step – but the effect of seeing it was somehow greater than any mortal-summoned Light. For a moment, it was as if she stood back in New York on a cloudless summer’s day.

Henry scrabbled forward and upward over what might once have been stairs, and then they stood within the radius of the Light’s fully-Lit reach, and both of them caught their breath. It wasn’t just a point of Light, glowing from somewhere beyond: it was an entire _pool_ of it, perhaps twenty feet in diameter, spread over an even deeper, Darker hole that plunged into the rock below. From the pit lazily stretched a Darkness that withstood even the Light of the disc, and there was a flow of it creeping upward and outward around the edges where the disc did not fully cover the pit. It dispersed rapidly, almost eagerly, as it reached open air. 

Yet that was not what caught their gaze the most, although on some unconscious level it made them both shiver. On top of the disc of Light lay a man, his hands clasped together on his chest as in the manner of a sleeping fairy-tale prince. His clothing was an archaic uniform made for an earlier age, but where a sleeping prince would have been garbed in cloth of gold and silver, his clothes and armour had clearly seen a great deal of wear and tear. Somehow, they seemed greater than any prince’s garments anyway – for even as he rested upon his shield of Light, he was also clearly the source of it.

“Light,” breathed Henry. “Is he... could he be like Donald?” His voice caught upon their fallen friend’s name.

In the presence of the Light, Anthony stirred in Henry’s arms again; swiftly, Henry knelt and set the other man gently down. “Anthony?” Janet asked, her eyes flickering back and forth between Anthony and the glowing man’s still form.

Was that – a _breath?_ She stared.

“Hank?” Anthony’s voice, as before, was slurred; he was still not fully present. “...Jan?” His eyes stared off into nothingness, and would not focus when Henry attempted to catch his gaze.

“Hank, look,” said Janet urgently, pointing at the disc of Light as it caught her full attention once more. And indeed, it was most attention-grabbing – “It’s shrinking!”

It was indeed – in slow, but noticeable increments; it would maintain size for a while, and then continue to shrink. The edges of the pit were already exposed; at the current rate, Henry estimated after watching another cycle, the shield would be fully gone within the day.  

“ _Oh_ ,” said Janet softly, for she had seen this man’s face before – in a different book full of fairy-tales, ones based on history and yet no less fantastical – or so she had thought. But the stonegnomes were creatures not even in myth, and it was from their stories that she now drew her own conclusions. “The Paladin – this is his Shield. _”_

“And it’s failing,” said Henry grimly. He looked down at the total blackness that lay beneath the Shield. “I guess the stonegnomes were right.”

“Hank, he’s _breathing,”_ insisted Janet. She bit her lip. “Can you take Anthony’s Darkwards? If I can fly out – we have to get him off of there.” She looked down at Anthony, who was swiftly falling back into unconsciousness.

“He’s too large for you to carry,” protested Henry, but his mind was already working at the problem, and he took the Darkwards from her with a grunt. “Although, rope, I could yank him out fast enough I think. Jan, if we do, his Shield might fail entirely.”

“The Darkness already has room to be rising more than it is,” said Janet, gesturing at where the shadows were slowly bubbling over – but only at a slow simmer; her words rang true. She flitted over to where Anthony had supplies hung about him, and began to partially unshrink a rope, keeping it thin and light enough that she’d be able to carry it with ease.

“I didn’t say we should leave him,” said Henry. “Just... please be ready to fly away quickly.”

She pecked him on the cheek – as large as the disparities in their sizes were now, he barely felt it – and took the rope in hand. At once, as she flew out, the effort of warding it from the Dark grew – and grew, and continued to grow, until she was having difficulty beating her wings. She landed upon the Paladin’s chest and wavered on her feet.

“Jan!” cried Henry. “Let me take a part of the wards.”

“You’ve enough to do with yourself,” she called back, faintly enough that he’d not have heard her if the Dark hadn’t had a silence all its own. “I just... need a rest...”

But although she told herself that, she knew it to be untrue; she was exhausting more magic with each passing second. Perhaps Anthony could draw upon his own soul and not feel the effort until he suddenly collapsed; a more conventional mage, however, felt every bit of magic being expended – and the power that her Darkwards now demanded was like a weight crushing down on her, a load beneath which she staggered. She grit her teeth. Sir Steven Rogers had saved the stonegnomes and likely all of humanity with his Shield – and after a hundred years, she _was_ going to pull him out of it alive.

Though her wings felt like lead sheets, she took to the air once more, weaving under and around his body until he was securely bound, then returning to sit atop him and tie several sturdy knots. Her vision blurred as she worked, and she half collapsed against him, tucking her arm through one of the strands of rope.

“Now,” she croaked, in a voice that she feared would not carry across the gap to Henry.

It did. The next thing she knew the rope tightened, rubbing painfully against her arm, and then they were flying in an altogether different manner than she was used to as Henry gave the rope a massive pull up and over. The sudden vertigo of free-fall hit a moment later – and then an aching, freezing pain as the shield beneath them died and the Deeper Dark roared upward from below, unimpeded. Dimly, she was aware of the bright, protective warmth beneath of the Paladin – and then the Darkwards on the rope cracked. The last thing she heard was Henry, shouting, “Jan? JAN!”

Then her strength gave out, her magic buckling beneath the load at last, and the Dark took her too.

 

 

“ _JAN!_ ”

Her tiny form was far too still – she looked like a broken cloth doll lying against the Paladin’s chest, and for a terrible moment Henry feared he had crushed her when he’d caught them both – that he had been too slow to ward her, when he realized her own Darkwards were flickering. No. _No_. Did she yet breathe? As large as he was, he could not see – his vision seemed to waver. He shrunk himself down faster than he ever had before, throwing himself to her side, and placed his ear beside her mouth, searching for some sign – some sign –

\- there; breath against his cheek... the rise and fall of her chest, which was not merely motion from the unconscious man they were laying upon. “Oh, Light,” Henry sobbed, searching for those signs again, needing to be _sure_ ; and when he at last could be sure, he pressed kisses to her still face and wept tears of relief.

Beneath them, the Last Paladin made a sound; Henry lifted his head, and realizing the precariousness of their perch upon a total stranger, grew in size just enough to tenderly lift his wife and pull them both from the Paladin, to rest against Anthony’s side instead. The Paladin groaned at the brief increase in weight upon him, and then again when it was lifted. Thin slivers of Light covered him, mostly concentrated in his gauntlets, but flickering also through the antiquated metal armour that he wore; Light, yes, but strangely pale Luminescence compared to the column of Darkness now rushing from the pit behind him. Was it Henry’s imagination, or was the air already growing thicker?

“No...” the Paladin moaned. “I won’t let... where...?” his voice changed from despairing resolve to confusion as he opened his eyes.

“Sir Rogers,” called Henry, his voice nearly cracking from recent strain. “We’re friends – you’re... well, not safe, but we’re friends.” He could not think of what to say; much of his attention was taken up keeping his fingertips at Janet’s wrist, checking that her pulse continued – steady, strong.

Sir Rogers blinked a few times and sat up, putting a hand to his head, and peered at the three of them, seemingly by reflex placing a hand to Anthony’s neck to check for a pulse. “You... fairies?” he asked, baffled, looking between Janet and Henry. “And a – not a paladin...?”

“Mages,” corrected Henry, although as he glanced down at his wife he half-smiled and added, “I can see how you’d be confused. No, we’re all human.”

Sir Rogers shook his head with a wince. “And we’re... in the Darkness, here,” he realized. Despair drew over him. “I thought I could shut the portal. I’ve failed.”

“You succeeded for a hundred years,” said Henry. His voice was too harsh, his words too blunt. Janet would know how to say this, were she awake. “But now...”

Sir Rogers stared at him in shock. “A – a hundred years?” He shook his head – and his gaze caught upon desperately Janet’s still form, as if she were a lifeline – someone he could help, something he could _do_. “The lady – if she’s injured, I can help – ”

“Please,” said Henry, and his voice did crack this time.

Very cautiously, the Paladin reached out with the tip of his index finger to touch Janet’s brow, and there was a brief flicker of Light – not brief due to weakness, but rather due to a fine, downright exceptional control. He pulled his hand away. “She’s only exhausted,” he reported – sounding none too rested himself. “I can aid but a little against that.”

Henry closed his eyes and sighed; his breath shook with relief.

“But you, sir mage...” Sir Rogers bent his face close again, his eyes upon the cast that enveloped Henry’s arm. “I see you _are_ injured. May I?”

“I... oh. Yes. Please. But Stark – Lord Stark – is the worse off, I suppose.” Henry’s own hurts seemed far removed, lifted by each breath that Janet took in his arms.

“What I can do for him is being done. This will take but a moment.” This time the Paladin used both hands, taking his off-hand from Anthony’s pulse-point and extending both index fingers to rest them on either side of Henry’s tiny arm. Henry gasped as a flush of warmth extended over him – like Light shining not on but _through_ him – and whatever lingering pain remained in his arm vanished.

“Done,” said Sir Rogers, looking as relieved as if it had been his own pain removed. He placed his hand back against Anthony’s neck, as Henry stared down at his arm.

Anthony stirred. “Ow,” he mumbled, turning his head into Sir Rogers’ touch. “What did I...”

“Careful,” said Sir Rogers, making Anthony’s eyes blink open.

“I – ” he sat up, clearly struggling to conceal the effort it cost him; Sir Rogers caught his arm before he could accidentally knock Henry or Janet with his flailing about, and eased him upward, shifting around so that they were side-by-side, Sir Rogers’ hand staying on Anthony’s shoulder even after Anthony was sitting upright on his own. “Oh, apologies,– wait – who – ?”

“Sir Steven Rogers, at your service,” said Sir Rogers, and Anthony’s jaw dropped.

He shut it a moment later and rubbed a hand across his eyes. “I’m dreaming.”

“I wish you were,” said Henry, not quite snarling it.

Anthony glanced downward, and was at once aghast. “Jan! What happened!”

“She pushed herself into magical exhaustion,” said Henry. “From which I’m only a few hours away, myself.” He looked down, caressing Janet’s still face, as though he needed reassurance that her body yet held the warmth of life. “We lost Donald, when you fell – he held them off as we ran.”

Anthony hunched inward on himself, keeping his hands over his eyes for a long moment.

“Donald?” Sir Rogers inquired, with grave sympathy.

“Our fourth companion,” said Anthony, his voice once again under his control. He darted quick glances at the legendary Paladin every few moments, but did not seem quite able to meet the other man’s eyes, although Sir Rogers’ hand had not left Anthony’s shoulder all the while. “He... there are dangers down here in the Dark that are unsafe to speak of. Are you truly Sir Rogers?”

“The title is admittedly only a few years old, but I’ve held the name all my life,” said Sir Rogers with a twist to his lips. He grew even more sombre as he looked out over the pit beyond them, and then glanced back to take in all three of them. “I don’t know how I’m alive... I didn’t expect to survive the Paladin’s Sacrifice. But I didn’t expect to fail to close the Gate, either.”

“It _was_ a doorway to another world, just as Grommet said,” said Henry, elaborating for Anthony’s benefit, “You can’t see it quite so well as before, but we came across Sir Rogers here floating on a Shield of Light over – well, that. And _that_ is definitely pouring out Darkness faster than it was when even a part of the shield was still there.”

“Then I must try again, and I must not fail this time,” said Sir Rogers. His fingertips bit into Anthony’s shoulder, a thoughtless spasm of strength, and then he realized it and relaxed his grip, shooting the wizard an apologetic look. “But first, I must see you to high ground.”

“There won’t be any high ground unless we find the damn anchor,” said Henry, his voice tight.

“Anchor?”

Henry and Anthony exchanged a glance. Anthony winced and looked away; Steven, however, did not let go of him. “We’ve not much time left,” said Henry – but Anthony had slumped again, pulling his Dweomer-stone from his pocket to occupy his hands and sight-line.

Sir Rogers raised an eyebrow, and Henry sighed and relented. “This is a very abbreviated version,” he warned the Paladin, and then proceeded to summarize in short order humanity’s flight to the skies, the sudden renewed rise of the Dark, and what they had found in the Stark Tower. “If we don’t catch the thief, we’re all dead,” he concluded grimly, glancing down at Janet again. “But down here... I have to get her up, out of here,” he pleaded.

“Then go,” said Anthony quietly, staring at the Dweomer-stone in his hands.

“And doom her that way instead?” Henry snarled.

“The thief is past the Gate,” said Anthony. His voice sounded very distant; he was clutching the Dweomer-stone with such force that his fingertips had turned white, and as he spoke, he magically tugged control of his own Darkwards from Henry’s grasp – and swayed further into Sir Rogers’. “You’ve admitted the Darkwards upon you even here are too much; they won’t hold inside of _that_.” He jerked his head at the geyser of Darkness spewing from the pit.

Henry’s face was bloodless as well. “No, they won’t.”

“Go,” commanded Sir Rogers, and when he saw Henry’s continued hesitation, he added, “With my blessing, sir mage. Save her – and warn the stonegnomes. Warn your Cities. Save whomever else you can.”

Henry looked helplessly between them, and for one long moment, his face screwed up in an expression of frustrated anguish. But then the transmutation spells hummed to life about his head once more, and his enormous, docile insect scrambled up to them; with a look of slightly repulsed bemusement, Sir Rogers carefully assisted him in situating himself and his wife atop the creature’s carapace.

They all three looked at each other for a long moment – and then Henry looked down at Janet again. “Don’t die,” he said, his voice for once as small as his form. The other two nodded gravely, unseen – and Henry’s creature trundled off into the Darkness, the small Light he had swiftly fading away.

Anthony dropped his eyes again. His strength was returning, swifter than he had dared hope – but the way it had given out before, dropping him into blackness so suddenly... he did not know how long his power would last in the abyss that awaited them past the Gate. It was going to be up to Sir Rogers – in which case, they were doubtless far better off than they had been before. Yet if there were any chance he might be of aid, Anthony knew he must attempt it. Unlike Henry, he had no other commitments... nothing left to lose.

He stood, awkwardly, with Sir Rogers’ aid. For his part, Sir Rogers did not seem to be in a great hurry to go after the anchor; perhaps he was planning some strategy. The Captain of the Paladins had been legendary for his tactical genius as well as his bravery and kindness, after all. Anthony did _not_ expect Sir Rogers to draw closer to him, wrapping an arm about his shoulders as they both stared down at the Gate – he stiffened in embarrassed confusion at the strange intimacy. He had been more forward in his own time, but this was hardly the _place_ – he must be misunderstanding –

“Zola. It has to be.” Sir Rogers’ voice was low and echoed with pain; Anthony dared to glance at him, and saw that the Paladin’s face was pale, lined with weariness.

By Light, he was an idiot – Sir Rogers had awoken and been told that a hundred years had passed, and humanity had abandoned the Earth – of course, he must yet be in shock.

“He would be dead by now,” said Anthony, trying to be gentle about it. “Perhaps... some apprentice of his – ”

Sir Rogers shook his head, his jaw firming; the edge of pain vanishing beneath an unconquerable determination. “No. I think it is the man himself. You underestimate the evils of necromancy, Anthony. It is not of the sort of soulcasting performed by Paladins, which I sense that you have been making use – _overuse_ – of yourself. Taking life from others... Zola is a monster, and a creator of monsters. One shouldn’t ascribe human limits to him; he has sunk entirely beneath humanity.”

Anthony became aware that he was gaping like a child at an Illusionist. He snapped his mouth closed.

“You are staring at me as if I suggested the sun rose in the East,” said Sir Rogers. “Is the concept of his monstrosity so difficult to understand, in this future of yours?” He sounded hopeful, almost wistful.

“No, it – perhaps it is,” said Anthony. “I believe I must have misheard, however. You did not truly just imply that _Paladins_ were – are – _Necromancers?”_

Sir Rogers straightened, his shoulders drawing back in an entirely formidable way, and withdrew his arm from around Anthony’s shoulder. “I certainly suggested no such thing,” he said. “How on Earth did you read that into what I said?”

“You use soulcasting,” said Anthony faintly. The loss of contact felt like grief – but that was ridiculous. He was no longer some weeping adolescent, desperate for a mythic hero to save him.

“As do you.”

“Well, I thought,” Anthony fumbled, and Sir Rogers’ hand returned – not around him, sadly, but to grasp his nearer shoulder.

“You’ve got something tied around you,” he said in concern.

Anthony swallowed. “I’ve sworn mage-oaths. I cannot speak of it.”

That earned him a second frown, and Anthony closed his eyes against it. “Those are – were – illegal for a reason,” Sir Rogers said. “O, God! Now I truly know that none of my order have survived. They’d have had those things off you long ago.” And, with a flare of Light from his own hands, he wrapped a glimmering shield about Anthony and tugged at unseen strings. Anthony gasped and nearly fell over as the shield faded away; he put out a hand to steady himself, but Sir Rogers held him up – and clung to him in return, for the Paladin had paled again with the exertion.

“What did you just _do?_ ” Anthony demanded, looking down at himself wonderingly.

“Mage-oaths are barbs that hook into the soul,” said Sir Rogers simply. “And Paladins are trained to defend souls – and to soulcast, as need be.”

“You just... broke them,” said Anthony, stunned. “I can... I could say anything.”

All his secrets. All the things he’d so longed to confess – the great sin that had driven him into the Dark time and again in penance for his cowardice. He could speak.

The shock of it rendered him mute.

“Speech is a requirement for freedom,” said Sir Rogers. “And without freedom the soul withers. Soulcasting is not magic, but it can undo some of the effects of magic – but were you not soulcasting yourself, to put yourself in such a state?”

“I suppose I was,” said Anthony slowly, “But... it was by this.” He held out the Dweomer-stone for Sir Rogers to examine.

Sir Rogers took it, and looked at it with some fascination, but no comprehension. “I’ve never been the best scholar of theory, but I suppose in a hundred years mages may make many advances!” he said, and laughed a bit sadly as he handed it back. “Then – if you didn’t know what it was – the art of soulcasting must have died with my order.”

“I’m sorry,” said Anthony, rote condolences for grief. His voice sounded to his own ears like it was coming from very far away.

“What you can do with magic might yet be enough. But I should tell you of Zola – and I would take a longer moment to buoy us both, before we venture down there.” He bowed his head in thought for a long moment before he began. “It was... it seems strangely both only immediately past, and yet at a great remove now,” he mused. “I do not think I was entirely aware of my surroundings as I slept – but perhaps I did notice the passage of time. Regardless. Zola has been a foe of the Paladins since before the beginning of the War, although it was not until two years ago – a hundred and two now, I suppose – that we realized he was perhaps the greater danger than his once-master, the Red Skull.”

“Such a man truly existed?”

Sir Rogers nodded grimly. “Oh, yes. He was slain last year – in the last year, I mean – by the Sacrifice of my oldest friend.” He paused, eyes closed in momentary grief; when he opened them again to continue, they glistened with unshed tears. “But cut off one head and two more will rise... that was Hydra’s boast. At the time we thought Zola the next head – it was only too late I began to wonder if he were not the greater threat all along. The Red Skull was a charismatic madman, a leader of the damned, but Zola could place his hands upon healthy men and women and leave nothing but husks behind. When the Western Front began to go in our favour, he must have grown desperate. We knew that the Skull had long searched for ancient – mythical, even – artefacts. We didn’t know that Zola had found one – a doorway unto death.”

He sighed wearily. “If you have met the stonegnomes, then you know that the truth is more complicated than that. But for those of us who first encountered the Dark, it was true enough. Paladins were not affected, but neither could we heal those touched by its powers.” His fists clenched in remembered frustration. “He knew exactly where to strike – teleported himself right into York, then-untouched by war. Packed to the brim with refugees. And home to the last of the training centres remaining for Paladin initiates, the last of my order. Here.” He gestured to their surroundings. “You sit in its ruins now, for it was with their murders – their souls – that he ripped open the walls between worlds.

“After that, not even Howard - the High Wizard – could get close. He teleported across an ocean to fetch me, instead. I entered and found Zola, but he was by then beginning to change... he was no longer human; he walked within the Dark without Light and without dying, and I could no longer sense his soul. Perhaps he was already dead; if any Necromancer could reach that final atrocity, it would be him. In any case, we fought, he laughed at me, and told me that we next met, he would be as a god. Then he fled into the Darkness, and as I pursued him, I became lost. Eventually the stonegnomes found me, and guided me back to the Gate, through which they were already fleeing.

“I thought it had been but a few days... but York! Oh, York!” Sir Rogers voice broke with grief. “It was a place of nothing but death.  I found Howard at the Gate, trying to close it – driving back the Dark by mage-Light alone. He must have been the only wizard in the world who could have managed to stand within the Dark for more than a few moments; I know how mage-Lights tax you. And more – he told me that he’d pulled up a mountain, one of the Catskills I think, and set it as a flying city to bear refugees upwards and out of reach. I thought he’d gone mad. He certainly looked it – he was a half-step from raving, terrified of Zola and desperately alone in the Dark.

“But mad or not, the Gate had to be closed. There was no other option; I sent Howard away and made the Sacrifice. My greatest fear then was that Zola would return and reopen it.” His voice dropped. “I was too prideful; I did not think that I would fail.”

For a moment after his story, there was silence.

“We’ve had a hundred years of peace,” said Anthony after a moment. “There’s – nine million people live in the Seven Cities. It’s not what it was, but... we’ve had a century of peace.” Carefully, almost incredulous of his own temerity, he leaned against the other man, and slipped his own arm around Sir Rogers’ in return. “You didn’t _fail_. The stonegnomes, too – they owe you their peace.”

“Perhaps,” said Sir Rogers. He leaned against Anthony in turn, so that they now held each other up – two battered souls at the mouth of Darkness. “It doesn’t matter now. What matters is tracking down this thief, and I know in my heart and soul that it _is_ Zola.”

“I believe you,” Anthony said, turning over the Dweomer-stone in his free hand. He glanced out at the pillar of deeper Darkness slowly rising from the Gate. “But I admit, I don’t know how much use I’ll be... you might not be able to count on me.” He coughed, to clear a painful obstruction from his throat; it didn’t work, so forced himself to speak around it. “Although I’m feeling a lot better than when I woke up.”

“We’ve been buoying us each other since I woke up, Anthony,” said Sir Rogers – Steven, if he would take such informal liberties with Anthony’s name – an overture that Anthony in no way deserved. “You’d burned off most of your outer self.” He hesitated. “As had I – but I’d expected to shatter my soul; for me the surprise was waking up. But I know some tricks to buoy in a hurry; we might be able to restore ourselves to fighting shape.”

Anthony stared at Steven in horror. “No,” he protested. “No, if I was... I can’t be using your soul, I’d know!”

Steven looked back at him in amazement. “Good Lord, Anthony, of course you’re not. What on Earth is it you _think_ we’re doing?” 

Anthony flinched. “I...”

Steve’s voice gentled. “You had to have known some of what you were doing to yourself when you called upon your own soul, at least.”

“Yes, but...” Anthony swallowed, looking out over the blackness. How could he confess this? To Sir Steven Rogers, Captain of the Paladins, the _Last_ Paladin – hero of myth and legend... who had apparently not realized what Howard must have done to send the Cities soaring skyward. He’d spoken of Howard with fondness; he could not have known.

But that was not for him to decide, was it? This was the Paladin – Sir Steven Rogers himself. A hero who had _fought_ in the Second Chaos War – who had come face to face with the Arch-necromancer himself, Arnim Zola, and seen the terrible things that the Black School could do. If anyone deserved to know – if anyone could truly judge the price paid for the survival of humanity – Anthony squared his shoulders, and forced himself to look Sir Rogers straight in the eye. “I thought it akin to Necromancy.”

Steven recoiled as if stung. The look in his eyes felt like a hot iron brand – but Anthony refused to show it. He waited, instead. It felt almost like relief.

“Necromancy – ” the thought clearly appalled the Paladin. But after a moment in which he struggled to contain himself, he sighed heavily. “I suppose from a mage’s point of view they would seem more similar; both deal with souls, lives. One is taken from the caster, shared willingly and freely, as natural as breathing; the other is a dark, perverted form, and from what I heard of it from our mages, only made possible by binding it into complex arcane rituals: it must be forced, as it is otherwise anathema. Anthony, I don’t know you, but you have volunteered without hesitation to join me now, although you know how dangerous it is – you came all this way down here... Janet mentioned the Darkwards’ were of your invention. I know that must have taken experimentation. In all that soul-searching... how could you think yourself as twisted as a necromancer must be?”

It felt as though something was cracking inside him, but this was no overuse of magic; this was an entirely different type of break. Anthony tugged away from Steven’s grasp and fell to his knees before him, bowing his head without thought. “Because I am.” It came out as a whisper. “Sir Rogers, you don’t know what I’ve done. The link to the Dweomer that powers the city – _I_ am its keeper, and its source is all the citizens of the Seven Cities. I have been eating away their souls for the past nine years, every time I tune it – I can feel it, a debt I can _never_ repay – ”

A hand upon his cheek stopped him; Steven was crouched before him, his eyes conflicted and seeing half into the past, half into the present. “Oh, Howard, what did you do?” the Paladin asked.

“Zola told you that he would become a god,” Anthony continued, the words tumbling from him even faster now. “Howard made us gods of death instead, and since then we have fed on our own people. The old, the young; the rich and poor; criminals and the innocent. I demand a tithe of ten years from them all and I don’t even tell them I’m killing them. And I told myself I’d fix it, that I could think of another way, but it’s been sixteen years and I’ve failed. If I’d had more courage I’d have gone to the University Council the day my father told me. I am a coward, Sir Rogers, and a necromancer – but please. _Please._ Allow me to aid you in this. If I can help you kill Zola – ” he swallowed painfully. “Nothing can make up for the evil that I’ve done, the evil that I’ve watched and allowed to be done. But please. Let me do this.”

The hand upon his cheek did not vanish; he waited a breath, and then turned his head away from it. But instead of letting him go, it slipped beneath his chin instead, and Sir Steven drew his face upward, until, unwillingly, he met the Paladin’s eyes.

“I won’t deny that you’ve done wrong,” said Steven quietly. “And should we get out of this we are _certainly_ looking for another way. But sixteen years... how old were you when you were told, Anthony? Twelve? Thirteen? You were a child. The road to Hell may be paved with good intentions, but those good intentions can lead you back, too. Anthony, Tony, you’re here now. Ready to give your life for your people. How can I look at you and see anything except a man of the highest value?”

“I can never repay my mistakes.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” said Steven, and kissed him.

Anthony froze in shock, so completely that Steven might as well have been kissing a statue, and after a few seconds, the Paladin drew back. “I can feel your admiration,” the Paladin said, bringing up his other hand to cup Anthony’s face in his hands. “You think of me as someone out of legend, but I am just a man – I’ve made so many mistakes – you’ve no idea. And here you are – ” he kissed Anthony again, as Anthony leaned forward, half-shaking with disbelief, “here you are,” he murmured against Anthony’s lips, “ready to stand for what is right no matter what you’ve been taught.”

“I doubt you’ve made mistakes quite on this level,” Anthony murmured, but then he was kissing Steven back, clutching at his arms with shaking desperation. He pushed forward, tried to force Steven to turn the kiss more punishing, as much an abasement as he deserved – but Steven ran a gentling hand over his shoulder and arm and kept the kiss slow and sweet, unbearably so, until Anthony might have wept. Steven let him fall forward, until he was half-cradled by the Paladin, his arms wrapped around the other’s back and neck as though Steven were a rock in a storm. 

“Please,” gasped Steven, as he broke away again. Both of them were breathing heavily. “I’m not an idol. I wasn’t buoying us only for your sake. A hundred years and I’ve felt them pass – so Goddamned alone!”

“You deserve better than _me_ – ”

“Do you think I’d do this with someone I hated? It doesn’t even work like that. Come, you must be able to feel this, as I can – ”

He could; he _could_ , and Anthony didn’t know if it were this ‘buoying’ that Steven spoke of, or if it were merely that he’d gone so long without intimacy, without human touch, himself. This time he kissed Steven back from the first, letting himself be lowered to the unnatural rock; Steven cushioned his head with one hand as he pulled himself down against Anthony, the contact between their bodies filling a hunger that Anthony had forgotten he had. The antiquated armour was yet light enough, unpadded enough, that Anthony could feel Steven’s hard erection pressing against him – just as his own was pressing against the other man in return. He reached downward, but Steven caught his hand and clasped it between them.

“Look at me,” said Steven, and kissed him upon the mouth again, then broke it to press kisses over his face; across, to breathe over the curve of Anthony’s ear, “If you won’t see it yourself then look at me – I know you can feel what I feel – _admiration_. Respect. Do you forget I can see your soul? Do you think me _blind?_ ”

The words struck Anthony like a ringing bell; he gasped against their intensity, against the strange resonance of despair that he could feel from the other man – _just_ another man, now; one could no more touch a statue in this way than the moon could touch the sun. He was no shy novice lover, yet this – “Buoyancy,” he said, the word becoming a gasp as Steven teased kisses down his neck, and reached up to undo the laces of his shirt, pressing kisses against him there as well. “This is – this is it?”

“Oh, Anthony,” Steven sighed, tucking his head beneath Anthony’s chin for a moment, pressing his ear to Anthony’s chest and listening to his heartbeat. His hand smoothed against Anthony’s side, over his clothes and then seeking a way under. “You’ve been bound by mage-oaths to silence too long; the oldest method in the world of halving troubles is to share them – and this is the oldest way in the world to know another, deeply, intimately – to share burdens – to lift souls.”

Anthony could not help it; he laughed, weakly. “And here the tales tell of the virtuousness of the Paladins.”

Steven’s eyebrows raised in surprise. “Love is the greatest virtue there is. Share pleasure. Shared joy.” He wriggled lower down, pulling at the laces of Anthony’s breaches until finally, _finally_ his cock was free – and then stopped, tantalizingly close – Anthony pressed his hands against the ground beneath him, eyes fluttering closed. “You have my admiration,” Steven said, and Anthony could feel his breath, he was so close – “My devotion, here and now – I do not _care_ about whatever faults you may have made. I would not do this with someone I did not admire.” He kissed his way down Anthony’s cock, lips too gentle and not enough, his words far too much, too close to breaking something deep in Anthony’s heart. How long had it been since he had felt worthy of admiration?

Not just him. Not just him. There was grief in Steven’s voice as well, and Anthony grabbed at his arms and pulled him upward – “Come here,” he demanded, and rolled them over so that he was on top – they barely missed rolling off the edge of the rise that they were lying upon, and for a moment they both had to scrabble lest they fall.

Steven huffed out a laugh; Anthony’s eyes narrowed. “You, sir, are a tease,” he informed Steven – and then it was his turn to bend down, to kiss, because he could feel that grief, so unlike his own and yet the same in their loneliness. Steven was beneath him and his arms around him, and when Anthony fumbled his hands between them this time he was not put off; he managed to get Steven’s breeches down and then their cocks were rubbing together, and they groaned as one. “Let me,” said Anthony, reaching with both hands and becoming unbalanced; Steven rolled them both onto their sides with his powerful legs, and they lay there entwined, Anthony’s skilled, clever hands working at them both. He would have tucked his head into the other man’s neck, curled up and let himself be held, but Steven tipped his mouth upward again and they kissed, far more frantic now, the rutting motion of their own hips doing half the work for Anthony’s hands. It was Anthony who came first, with a groan, and Steven held him through it, although the stuttering of his hands was torture – and then he reached down and placed his own hand over Anthony’s, and finished himself off as well.

They lay there, legs tangled, as their breathing slowed. Anthony could feel a swell of lazy satisfaction rising within him – a buoyancy born of touch and affection, of physical comfort, and the half-incredulous thought of being, _somehow_ ,regarded as worthy enough to perform this act with one to whom he had confessed the greatest of sins...

“We all make mistakes,” said Steven, somewhat languidly; his voice was close and hot against Anthony’s ear. “Don’t put me on a pedestal.”

“You’re much too human for that,” said Anthony, marvelling at the truth of it.

“I’ve been alone for too long. Please.”

The state they existed in now seemed timeless; both had closed their eyes, and in the presence of each others’ Lights the Darkness seemed far remote. For a while they almost drowsed, the weariness of an ancient war and a lifetime of self-contempt beginning to fade away, soothed by the presence of a lover – perhaps not a romantic lover, but certainly an immediate and steadfast friend.

Yet it could not last. It was Anthony who first recalled himself and reluctantly blinked open his eyes; and beside him, he could feel Steven beginning to tense once more. “We are an unholy mess,” the wizard muttered with some amusement, shining a Light that quite rudely illuminated the truth of his comment. He muttered a spell that he’d not had much chance to utter of late and cleaned them both up, before beginning to set their clothes in order.

Steven disentangled himself and began to assist him in this, although he first carefully tugged Anthony further away from the ledge. “This was the most unwise place I’ve ever done this in,” he remarked with some humour.

Anthony clucked his tongue. “I’m sure I’ve been less wise.”

Considering what they had just done together, it should not have surprised him so when the Paladin grinned roguishly and replied, “If we live through this, I shall challenge you to show me.”

It should have been a sobering reminder, for they both now turned to the Gate, the inky Darkness through which their Lights even now could not penetrate. Somehow, though, Anthony could not feel afraid; his heart was too full of Light, and he laughed instead, taking Steven’s hand. “Let me fire your imagination, then, Sir Paladin,” he said, and wrapped white-fire spell-lines around them both, lifting them into the air with power fueled by the Dweomer-stone.

“I can see uses for this,” said Steven slyly. Beneath the teasing, he too was prepared; he held his arm out and a small shield of Light grew upon it, growing to the size of a buckler and burning until it was too radiant to look at – but it burned back even this deepest Darkness as well, allowing them to see to the other side of the Gate. “Anthony – be cautious. Intimacy can buoy the soul, but one moment’s rest will not heal exhaustion.”

“Then I will make it count,” Anthony promised, and he dropped them through the Gate. 

 

 

The insect was distrustful of Henry at first, discomfited by the weight on its back; he cast two independent tethers to keep both himself and Janet safely secured upon it, and devoted his attention to soothing the creature’s fears. Its mind was more advanced than those of the insects that inhabited the Cities – but then, those were tiny creatures, smaller than either he or Janet were now. This one was positively enormous by comparison.

Unlike its smaller cousins – if they were indeed proper cousins, and not creatures that had migrated out of the strange world beyond the Gate – it could not cling so easily to vertical surfaces; instead, he determined as it scuttled its way up the side of Stark Tower, when it needed to climb it exuded a sort of sticky sap from every other leg. It seemed to be a remarkable adhesive, capable of –

Janet stirred in his arms, and at once all of Henry’s attempts at distracting himself flew away; he twisted them around so that he could see her face more properly, and patted her cheek. “Jan? Dearest?”

“Oh, my _head_...” she moaned, bringing up her own hand and pressing the heel of it against her forehead, before blinking her eyes open. Under other circumstances Henry might have moved the Light away, that it would not hurt her eyes – but it _was_ Light, and could do no harm. “Hank. You’re alright?”

“I should be asking you that,” Henry said, feeling giddy with relief. “You overdid it – ”

“Only for a moment,” she protested, flexing her fingers cautiously, then her arms, a careful self-examination limb-by-limb. “I’ve still some magic in me left – that much Darkness all at once was too much, but it was just a shock, not complete exhaustion. You can give me my own Darkwards back now, if – ” Her eyes had been growing more alert by the second as she continued to speak, and now she looked around sharply, perhaps recognizing for the first time the thinness of the Dark compared to that below. “Hank. Where in the Dark are we? _Where is Tony?_ ”

“With the Paladin,” Henry replied, his heart falling even as their insect continued to carry them upward. Janet’s eyes grew wide with fear. “No, they’re both alive,” he reassured her – although he realized as soon as he spoke that might not still be true. “You managed it – Light knows how! I couldn’t have warded the rope that far. And Anthony woke up – I think Sir Rogers healed him. Um, Sir Rogers awoke as well. They’re going after the anchor.”

“Then we have to go after them,” Janet said, fumbling around so that, although she was still tethered to the insect, she was no longer half-lying in Henry’s arms. “Give me back my Darkwards, and tether yourself to me – I can carry you a lot faster than this insect can.”

Henry shook his head, catching her hand in his own. “Jan. The anchor’s beyond the Gate. The... pit of Darkness.” He swallowed, hard. “We can’t help them.”

“But...” She stared back in horror – for she had experienced how very much they could not. To face Darkness of that magnitude certainly required an ability to handle enormous amounts of power that only... that only High Wizards possessed! They could not enter the pit.

“We have to go back,” said Henry gently. “Sir Rogers’ shield is gone – the Dark is rising faster than it ever has before. We need to warn the stonegnomes... and the Cities. We need to evacuate whoever we can.”

“But all the rest – ” Janet protested, her voice dropping to the barest breath. “Oh, Light, Hank, we can’t just run away – ” her voice caught, and Henry reached out to gather her in his arms, embracing her.

They clung together, swaying on their tethers as the insect continued its long climb upward – and then began to tilt back to horizontal. The insect had found a hole to re-enter Stark Tower... although how they were possibly going to get up out of the top of the Tower was, at this moment, entirely beyond Henry.

“Wait,” said Janet abruptly, with such urgency that Henry did not hesitate to mentally command the insect to stop. They held there, poised upon the precipice –

“Jan?”

“I saw something – there, again!”

Henry stiffened in alarm – he drew back, seeking to put himself between Janet and what she had seen. “Janet – think of something, a distraction – ”

“Not that,” she said, ducking about him by the simple expedient of casting her own Darkwards, breaking the tether, and taking flight. “I saw light – like lightning!”

“Jan, in such total darkness the brain starts interpreting random signals – ” Henry broke off, staring down below in the same direction. Light flashed – no mere flicker this time, but a true bolt, cracking out from somewhere far below, and by its brief illumination Henry could see two Walkers, made tiny by distance, impaled upon it – until they burst into nothing more than wisps of shadow.

A second later the thunder arrived: a sound the Darkness could not silence.

 

 

 

If the lower streets of York had been corroded by the Dark, then the place beyond the Gate was wholly corrupted. As Anthony set them down carefully, their boots crunched, a smell like a pyre wafting upward. Steven’s buckler shone brighter, casting over walls and obstacles that loomed, misshapen, like some optical illusion suddenly given malevolent life.

“How far is it?” Steven asked, nodding to the Dweomer-stone that Anthony had retrieved once more.

The wizard frowned at it. “Fifty feet, or thereabouts... straight down.” He glanced about at the twisted scenery. “We shall have to go around. If Janet or Henry knew how to use the Dweomer, one of them could bore through that much stone – but I haven’t their skill.”

“I can still remember some of the twists of this first stage,” said Steven. “And if this anchor is as large as you say, then there will be few enough paths it could have taken. Come; when the stonegnomes led me up, they took me that way,” he pointed, the movement of the shield upon his arm causing the shadows to shift and writhe, “but then, we travelled across, not down or up. Therefore, I believe we ought begin over here.”

“I’ve no idea how you can tell what is a tunnel and what is merely a shadow,” said Anthony, following the Paladin as closely as he could, as the pair of them picked their way across.

“My eyes adjusted the first time I was down here,” said Steven absently; his attention was fixed upon their surroundings. “But I don’t know if this is an extension of the training I received as a Paladin, or if it is merely something that human eyes require time for which to become accustomed.”

“I shall stay close, then.”

“No harm in that.”

They continued. After the life-forms the party had encountered above, Anthony was jittery with nerves, wary for what further monstrosities the Deeper Darkness might hold; but they encountered nothing along their rather circular route. Anthony glanced at the ceiling often – he was not entirely certain they had _not_ simply travelled in a circle, although it did seem that they had managed some downward progress – but then they abruptly came to a three-tined fork. Steven raised the shield of Light high again, illuminating one tunnel, then transferred the shield of Light to his other arm and shone it down upon the other two. “The middle grows too small, down there; it is to our left or our right.”

“Toss a coin?” suggested Anthony, but his expression was pinched around the eyes. “At least we’ve made progress, of a sort – I think we’re right underneath where we started.”

Steven turned more fully to him and caught his hands, pressing luminescence into them. At once, Anthony felt better. “That... is not buoying,” he murmured. “Careful, Sir Paladin. You’re no fresh daisy yourself, not after that hundred-year nap.”

“Perhaps, but I need not exert effort to ward myself; and when we find Zola, I shall not be using my abilities anymore than I am now.”

The name of the dread Necromancer hung in the air, a cloying, strangling thing that lasted after Steven’s voice had faded. Wizard and Paladin looked at each other, sharing a hunted glance – and the lingering echoes of the name grew, a low rumble that had them whirling to be back-to-back; white fire glowed in Anthony’s palm, soul-fueled power ready to be thrown, and Steven’s shield had grown to a full three feet across; he held it with one hand cocked, as if to throw it.

The echoes warped and shifted, twisted by the structures around them, and formed into words. _“So sure of that, are you,_ Captain _?”_ This accent was one that Anthony had never heard before – it was harsh, grating, entirely different from either the stonegnomes’ odd speech or the Paladin’s archaic vowels. Steven made a noise that from another man might have been called a snarl.

“Where in the Dark are you,” Anthony muttered, fumbling with the Dweomer-stone in his free hand.

 _“Where the dead always lie,”_ came the chopped, grating words. _“Below!”_

The ground fell out from beneath them.

They tumbled through the air for perhaps half a second – and then Steven caught onto Anthony and Anthony’s flight spells flashed into place, halting their descent while beneath them rocks continued to pour down. Anthony threw them instead onto a different trajectory than the tumbling rocks – a shift that saved their lives, for as they emerged into a larger cavern nearly beneath the first, crushing tendrils of Darkness flickered through the rocks and reduced those touched to sand.

Steven let go of Anthony’s arm, and taking the cue Anthony shoved him forward and away and released the flight spells from him; the Paladin tucked into a roll midair and landed gracefully, bouncing back to his feet and taking cover behind a twisted column as they both assessed their new surroundings. There was no point in attempting to hide – they were both beacons of Light.

Their foe was hardly attempting to hide his own presence. It took Anthony a moment more to realize that the thing he looked upon _was_ Arnim Zola; Steven, at least, had encountered the necromancer in person before, and knew the general shape of him, but the changes that a hundred years of the Deeper Darkness had wrought upon him had made him something less than recognizably human. His neck had elongated horribly, growing too thin in the process; his head had sunk down somewhere to the middle of his chest, but was bent up in another curve so that his face looked forward. His hands and feet bulged with shadow-matter, a grotesque counter-point to his arms and legs, which were almost Walker-like in their slenderness. All over he was hairless, and he wore garments made not of cloth, but pure Darkness.

He stood in the middle of a large platform; eight crystalline octagons made up the sides and corners, while a ninth, seemingly crafted of the same Darkness that garbed Zola himself, sat like a thing unbalanced in the middle. Anthony lurched in the air as the sight of it hit him – the octagons were arrayed wrongly. Each was at least the height of a tall man and composed of eight square sides; glowing, golden spell-circuitry ran beneath each crystalline surface, humming with Light and power.  But they were placed wrong. The square was not quite a square. The overlapping energies had fallen into discord. The Light in them ran erratically along the circuits.

 _Eight_ anchors. Anthony cursed his own foolishness – but only for a moment; he had no attention to spare from what was coming. Of course there were eight; eight towers, eight anchors, for the eighth school of magic. The school that should have been forgotten.

“So, Captain, you’ve awoken,” Zola cried gleefully. “Please, come out. We should be civilized about this.”

Steven stepped forward, his shield of Light held high. “Step away from the anchor, Zola.”

Anthony darted around behind the dark mage, attempting to get a better read of the anchors, and was dismayed at what he found. He’d to be very careful with his spell shots; the wards, although no doubt potent upon their creation, were almost completely worn down. Once those were gone, the spell-circuitry within might be able to resist the Dark as the golems had – but, like the golems, would be vulnerable to whatever Zola cared to do. They couldn’t afford to damage the wards. Removing Zola from among them was going to be a tricky affair – unless, perhaps, he could use the Dweomer-stone to refresh the wards from a distance. Equations and spell lines began to take form in his mind.

Zola ignored Steven’s words entirely. “I hadn’t expected you to survive your Sacrifice. Perhaps you did it wrong? Or perhaps fate knew that it would only be fitting if you were here at the last, to witness my final triumph.”

Anthony held up a hand to forestall Steven, his eyes scanning the lines of the anchors frantically. _There_. If he could simply manage to forge a link through this blasted Darkness...

He bit his lip hard enough to draw blood, and spat into his hand. Power burned at his fingertips, sending a tingling numbness shooting up his arm.

“The only more fitting circumstances would be if Lord Stark were here,” Zola continued, his voice growing uglier. Something deep and Dark crawled within it. “But I suppose we _are_ joined by him in spirit, aren’t we?” He turned to face Anthony, his mouth drawn up in a savage, gleeful grin. “I’d recognize the soul of a fellow necromancer anywhere, but you... you must be a grandson. Perhaps a great-grandson.”

“I think I ought feel insulted by that ‘perhaps’,” Anthony remarked tersely, twitching his fingers with restrained movements. He nearly had it – he simply needed to keep Zola talking for just a moment more...

“Yes,” purred Zola. “Definitely so. It is in your voice – the remnant of the power that should have been mine.” The anger only hinted at before now showed upon the surface, pitted with rage. “Three billion lives! Three billion souls – and he _stole_ them from me!”

Anthony froze. Possibly, Steven did as well – and then his voice rang out, clear and without doubt: “Howard was a good man.”

Only belatedly did Anthony remember to continue, but the thread of his spell had been lost; he fumbled for it, and it was a long moment before he could catch it again. Zola continued to speak: “A good man? A madman! Three billion souls, and he wasted them! For you see, Captain, humanity has run out of time. Those cities shall fall, and I shall harvest them – and then, with that power, the creatures that have moved to replace humanity upon the surface of the Earth. I shall have my billions, Captain. I shall be God.”

Steven had no doubt in his eyes. “I will never let you.”

There! Anthony had it. Slowly, secretly, he began feeding power into the wards surrounding the anchor. He needed to strengthen them quickly, before Zola realized what he was doing... as they were, one good blow would probably do them in.

“Let me?” Zola grinned. “But Captain – you, like they, are out of time. Thank you, Captain, for being so kind as to wait for me to finish.” He stamped his foot – and the backlash of the anchors’ wards breaking sent Anthony hurtling into a stalactite.   

“No!” roared Steven, launching his shield at Zola – who parried it with a bolt of Darkness made real, sending it flashing away. No sooner had the shield left his hand than Steven had thrown himself forward, and he rolled beneath the lashing tentacles of Darkness that Zola sent writhing his way, reducing various outcroppings from the floor and ceiling to dust.

Anthony picked himself up, not bothering to waste time by repowering his flight spells. He hadn’t even noticed Zola’s spellcasting – but the Necromancer must have been casting all during his monologue, must have been preparing to finally break the anchor’s wards even while Anthony had been attempting to repair them. Such mastery! In his office of High Wizard, he was counted among the greatest mages of the Seven Cities – yet this was a master who had brought a world to its knees, and then had a century more to perfect his craft. Anthony felt sweat break out upon his brow.

It did not matter. This was no semi-legal spell-duel between students; this was the life or death of all humanity, and there was no time for self-doubt. He threw his own protective wards over the anchors just as Steven reached them, jumped with a skill and grace that could not have been achieved by any modern soldier, and launched into a flying kick that planted one of his worn red boots firmly in the middle – which was to say, the face – of the once-human creature. Zola went reeling back, off of his shadow-anchor, as Steven followed up his attack with a flurry of blows – and was met with a black-lined shield of Zola’s own, one that made Steven’s face tighten with pain each time his fists connected, no matter that they were glowing with countering Light.

Anthony went to his aid, blasting at Zola’s back with rays of Light-reinforced fire – but the Necromancer was not so unprotected from behind as he at first appeared. Zola’s shield met these new attacks without sign of weakening; the Necromancer did not even turn, but instead summoned more of his Dark tendrils, lashing out at them both. Steven blocked, his shield of Light reforming in his hands, and slashed through several tendrils, then brought the shield down upon the Necromancer’s own.

Light proved the greater; the Darkness split. But Zola snarled and broke the ground beneath Steven’s feet as easily as he had done before, then dealt him a blow that sent him flying into a stalactite. Steven hit it shield-first, then fell to the ground curled beneath his shield, but that portion of the roof was already destabilized – he would swiftly be buried. Anthony abandoned his own attack and shouted flight spells instead – an inelegant shortcut that he had not required for years, yet one that he could not forego, not with the strain of so much Dark between them. He pulled Steven towards him, away from the debris, the strain lessening as the distance between them closed.

“Drop me here!” commanded Steven, and Anthony did as ordered, for in that time Zola had not been idle. Anthony, too, was now forced to the air, fleeing from Zola’s lethal disintegration spells; the cavern rained rock and dust in their wake.

“You’ll bring the cavern roof down!” he shouted at Zola, trying to make it like a taunt.

“It is mordrite and shall not touch me,” Zola proclaimed. “And as for _you_ , upstart brat – ” He grinned ghoulishly. “The line of House Stark. Could I be more fortunate? It might have taken me some time to bend all the circuitry of these devices to my will... but not with a Stark at my disposal.” He crooked one spindly finger.

It was as though someone had wrapped a string around his heart, and was now slowly pulling it out; Anthony lost control of all his flight spells and tumbled to the cavern floor, slamming into several stalagmites as he rolled. Blearily, he lifted his head. Zola stood by one of the anchors, one misshapen hand upon it – or, rather, upon the protective ward that Anthony had hastily cast around them all. Anthony raised one hand, weakly – and halted. He couldn’t call off the ward. If Zola got past him, the Seven Cities would fall.  

“Steven,” he croaked. “Steve – the anchors, shield them –” and then he broke off with a cry as Zola gripped and _pulled_.

Steven stopped immediately, and bowed his head; his shield had flown out to rest atop the nearest anchor and was beginning to spread in size, but its growth was slow, no matter the effort that he was obviously pouring into it. He gave Anthony a helpless look.

“You’re no Howard Stark, boy!” Zola shouted, his entire being wobbling and morphing as he cast his own Darkness to hold back Steven’s shield. “You’re no master of this art! Howard made a graveyard of one city and used it to destroy the next; Howard stole three billion dying souls, harvested them and used their power to fly your precious cities skyward – but he merely slowed me down! You think you can defeat _me_ when that was the best he could do? You can’t even stop me from stealing your own soul! And once I have yours, I shall have the key to this device...”

Anthony gasped for breath. His chest felt as though it were caught in a vise. Through eyes narrowed to slits he forced himself to keep watching, and keep concentrating. Steven’s shield had spread to cover all the anchors, now, and downward, despite Zola’s efforts – he just needed to hold it a little longer. Just a little longer. Once they were protected, Steven would... Steven would think of something...

His vision narrowed to a tunnel, until all he could see was that glowing shield, and the Darkness lashing against it.

Then the roof of the cavern fell in again.

The rush of the Darkness receding, the sudden absence of that ever-constant pressure, left him dizzied; he blinked, slowly, like one who had taken a sudden blow to the head. The cave’s ceiling had given way to the sun – no, not a sun, but an angelic figure wreathed with Light. It wore no halo, but godly energy crackled from its eyes; it had no wings, but a billowing cloak, as rich a red beneath the Light as it would have been beneath the noon-day sun.

“Zola!” roared the figure, in a voice that shook the cavern like a thunderclap. “Your foul unlife has come to an end!”

It rushed downward, wielding a hammer that left trails of lightning in its wake. Zola shrieked, and the shadows came to life, a tide of Darkness such as he had not bothered to summon against mere mortal men. It rolled over Anthony, collapsing him again with the effort of maintaining the Darkwards – and was driven back by the newcomer’s own Light once more, lifting the burden of them so that he might have been back up in the Greydark.

He struggled upright, and a small, twinkling Light dropped down in front of him – a pale fairy-light compared to that raging so near. “Anthony!” Janet exclaimed, hovering in front of his face. “Are you alright?”

“Of course,” he answered, pulling himself to his feet with the help of a nearby stalagmite. “I – how are you _here?_ And what – no, no time.” He shook his head. Perhaps he might not believe in the ancient angels that many in the Cities yet worshipped, but it was clear that the newcomer was an ally – and almost certainly responsible for the Darkness lifting. “The anchors. We need to get them out of here. And Steven – ” What had happened to Steven? The Paladin’s shield was no longer half-covering the anchor. Anthony’s wards were all that was left.

He hardened his heart. There was truly no time; their saviour might be holding Zola’s attention for now, but the battling pair were throwing off such energy as to tax his wards even from the anchor’s position on the side-lines. He needed to move the anchor, and swiftly, before his reserves ran out.

“You look like you’re about to fall straight back over,” said Janet, her tiny face creased with concern. “Stay here and catch your breath – if Hank and I can’t move it by transmutation or physical force, we shall need your flight spells.” She flitted off, before he had time to inform her that there was no chance of him catching his breath – not when each wave of Darkness battered the wards on the anchor and sapped his energy, and the rejoinders of Light burned so hotly that the wards were also flaring against the resultant sparks.

He held on to his stalagmite and assessed the battle. There were now two shining beacons of Light – Steven had joined the newcomer against Zola, and was ricocheting his shield back against the Necromancer’s magical protections, again and again, a distraction that had the misshapen man snarling as it allowed the would-be angel of Light an opportunity to shatter his forward defences. The trio presented a vision like that out of a hundred-year-old cathedral.

At first he could not spy either Janet or Henry – until both appeared from nowhere, ten feet tall and gaining further height still. Although he’d been aware that Janet was as capable of using transmutations spells of growth as Henry, he had never before seen her employ them, and it was a startling sight; he had, apparently, grown somewhat over-used to Henry enlarging himself when provoked, but the sight of Janet now doing the same was a queer one. They now stood on either side of an anchor, which was now a little less than half their height – Anthony doubted that they could grow much larger without great difficulty – and they bent to pick up the anchor in tandem.

Both groaned, giant noises compared to their usual voices. Anthony felt the pressure of their fingers upon his wards and leaned more heavily against the stalagmite. They strained, and managed to heave it a few feet sideways, before bringing it to rest upon the ground once more.

“Again,” said Janet grimly, but in this time they had caught Zola’s attention.

Anthony forced himself up and threw extra shields over them just before the Necromancer would have disintegrated them with that damnable tentacle spell. “Watch out!”

Both vanished to his eyes – shrinking back to tiny size, too small to be seen from this distance and with all the shadows at play. He gratefully let go of the extra shields, and poured the strength into the wards on the anchors instead – but not all of his strength. Janet and Henry had tried to lift an anchor and failed; it was time to face the true solution. He needed to fly the anchors out.

He didn’t know if he still had the strength. A greater emptiness clawed at him once more, as it had above, before he had so quickly lost consciousness. It was not like the mundane weariness of overtaxing his magical reserves – a malady that had caused many a mage to collapse, but never directly killed one. This would consume him – or rather, he was consuming himself, pouring his very soul into an ever-hungering void.

A figure appeared from nowhere – Henry, returned to ordinary human size so that he could run to Anthony at speed; a few yards away he leapt upward, shrinking in midair, conservation of momentum suddenly throwing him forward like a ball struck by a cricket bat. Anthony flinched, but was too muddled to try to catch him; fortunately, Henry caught himself with a trio of tethers, slowing himself enough that he could land perfectly on Anthony’s shoulder.

“We have a plan!” he cried – somewhat louder than was strictly necessary, given that he was now standing directly beside Anthony’s ear. “You can’t see it very well from here – but Thor and Sir Steven _are_ managing to break that demon’s shields; they just can’t get them to _stay_ broken. But it’s enough Jan can fly right in.”

Anthony shook his head, hard enough to make himself dizzy in his already precarious state, and he yelled, loudly enough that he hoped he might reach the other mage, “Janet, no! You wouldn’t survive!” More quietly, he explained, “Even if she could survive _behind_ those shields – and, look, the Darkness there is thicker than the miasma – his very touch... he is like one of the Walkers! Look at him!”

“We have,” said Henry, his tone making it clear that he was rolling his eyes. “That’s why you’re going to shield her. And yes – ” he cut Anthony off before he could object, “ – I _can_ see you’ve not got enough left in you. But you’re a necromancer, you’ve a Dweomer stone, and I’m right here. So you can use my soul, instead.”

Anthony flinched away, hard enough that Henry had to tether himself again to avoid falling from Anthony’s shoulder. “No. No, I _cannot_ – ”

“You can and will,” said Henry ruthlessly. “That is my _wife_ , Tony, and she’s going to attempt this very shortly, shielded or not, so you’d damn well better do it.”

Anthony buried his face in his hands. It was a regrettable move; the voluntary loss of his sight just made him dizzier.

“There’s no time for self-pity,” chastised Henry. “Hurry up, man!”

“Darkness take you,” Anthony swore at him – not entirely unaware of the irony. But the bulk of his attention he refocused upon the Dweomer-stone he had been holding, and upon looking out.

He had never attempted to do this before, save at the direct behest of his father; and then as now the knowledge of what he was doing left him sickened. If it had been a sense such as vision, then Henry’s soul would have been a bright, shining beacon: a willing sacrifice was so much easier to reap. Spells memorized through endless, agonizing drills formed at his fingertips as though it were second nature; he ensnared Henry’s soul in the trap, and began to pull.

There was a shift in the weight distributed on his shoulder; he was vaguely aware that Henry had fallen to his knees. It was a small concern beside the heady feeling of sudden _power_ – Henry’s own magical reserves might be dipping low, but his soul was untouched, far from the Cities’ leaching Dweomer-traps and buoyed high by the love and presence of his lifelong partner. It was tempting to pull more than he needed – to give over the entire load, the Darkwards and the wards upon the anchor, both.

But that would be vile betrayal. Henry had stated his intent clearly: this power was for Janet. The rush of it made it easier to find her, a simple net cast wide and woven densely, and he wrapped her in wards with a gentle, magical ‘tap’ on the shoulder. Then he cast over her again, and again – until he could feel her breathing within the protective cocoon of his power, could feel her searching for her moment. She flew and shrunk even further, to less than the size of an ant, and his mind flew with her – she needed to be very close to Zola, and surrounded by the melee, her own Darkwards would never have withstood the tide of power. No mere magic could.

“I’ve felt this before...” Henry muttered, struggling to his feet with the help of a firm grip upon Anthony’s ear; it ordinarily would have been painful, but too much of his attention was caught up with Janet. “I didn’t realize it until it was gone. All this time... the Cities have been killing us.”

The newcomer – Thor – struck, a blinding flash like lightning, and Steven took the opportunity as well to get in near and slam a palm full of brilliant light into Zola’s shielding – while on the opposite side his thrown shield hit the spot Thor had hit again, weakening it further.

Janet dove, a minute bullet of power. She slipped past the weak point just as it strengthened once more; a wall of opposing power tried to force Anthony’s shields away from her, and he pulled more strongly upon Henry, as strongly as he had pulled upon himself to create the false sun that had shredded the fog-demon.

It was so much _easier_ than doing that had been, though. He’d not thought it terribly difficult to pull power from himself – certainly, ever since he had learned how, he’d thought it much easier than putting such spells to their original malevolent purpose. The first times Howard had made him practice such things – they’d started upon insects, then quickly progressed to rodents, and eventually to unfortunate stray dogs – he’d been sick to his stomach. But that had been many years ago, and in all that time he’d never pulled power from a _person_ through a Dweomer-stone for his own use; it had always been maintenance, or exceptionally careful experimentation, done upon the Dweomer-traps littered across the Cities, woven into the levitation spells. He’d thought that if he ever tried it, it would make him feel as unclean as it had when he’d first snuffed life from a beetle.

But it didn’t. There was no oily sheen to this strength. There was only power, seductively plentiful. He bit his lip against it, hard enough that he again tasted blood.

It was enough, for Janet had flown to the unsuspecting Zola’s right ear, shrinking – it didn’t seem possible that she could shrink any further, and yet she was. She crawled inward, and the feeling of it made Anthony gag – a reaction cut off as his wards exploded from the inside-out.

The increase in size left him reeling; for a brief instant, the soul-traps he’d woven about Henry drew _far_ too much power. It was not Anthony pulling more from Henry’s soul, but the spell itself, bleeding the other man for all he was worth as the wards Anthony had wrapped around Janet went from being smaller than the head of a pin to a good ten feet across; had it not been for the direct tie he had to Henry’s soul, they simply would have failed instead. Instead, Henry spasmed and dropped with a cry, tumbling from Anthony’s shoulder as his active spells faded. Anthony cut the Dweomer-ties in an instant, but his own hands were shaking, and he missed catching the much smaller man. Henry hit the ground.

“Hank – Jan!” he shouted, fumbling for a Light and then finding he did not need one. Zola’s spells of Darkness were dispersing: the Lights from Sir Steven and Thor were more than enough to Illuminate the shattered cavern... and the ruin of the creature that had once been Arnim Zola.

Zola’s head was gone – exploded by the massive boulder that had appeared, grown in size from something smaller than a speck of dust, deep within his ear canal. Horrifically, that did not seem to have killed him; his Walker-like body was still moving, struggling to free the limbs that had been trapped underneath the hastily-enlarged rock. The arms flailed.

“Begone, shade,” intoned Thor, and he raised his hammer high above his head. The Necromancer writhed for a moment longer – and then a bolt of pure Light blasted down through the Gate, and the body finally collapsed, dissolving back into the ambient Darkness.

Anthony squinted, light-blinded. In his haste to prevent himself from accidentally killing Henry, he’d released the Dweomer-spells entirely – now, he could no longer use them to locate Henry as easily as thinking. “Henry, where – ”

A pained noise came from a few feet away; by squinting and looking somewhat off to the side, so that he could use his peripheral vision – the after-image of Thor’s lightning would take some time to fade from centre of his view – he made out Henry sitting up and rubbing his head. “You might have _caught_ me,” Henry complained.

His voice was shaky beneath the bravado. Anthony looked away. Janet – where was Janet? In trying to avoid killing Henry he’d cut the ties entirely – but it had not been her who had grown, merely her lethal rock. She’d still been there – had Zola died quickly enough? Oh, Light, if she died –

“That was extremely impressive, my Lady,” said Thor. His voice echoed about the cavern, filling it as much as his Light did – but he had one fingertip outstretched, and was seemingly speaking directly to it.

“It was a group effort,” Janet said modestly, her voice larger than her form should have allowed, and she, too, sounded shaky – but alive.

They were all alive! It seemed far too good to be true. Anthony let himself sink down against the cave floor; he was dimly aware of Henry doing the same.

Henry would be growing white hairs in the morning. Anthony knew he’d taken that much. And Donald...

“After all this time...” Steven’s voice was quiet, compared to the others; but down here in the Dark, in the Silence, there was nothing else to drown it out. Anthony couldn’t see him, but he heard slow footsteps. “All his evil... Lady Van Dyne, good Sir – the world is in your debt. _I_ am in your debt.”

The effort of warding the anchor began to chip at his awareness again. He was too far away from it: even with all the Light in the cavern, some of the Dark yet lingered. If he could get closer... he dragged himself to his feet, and bent to give Henry a lift up to his shoulder. By the time he’d made it to the anchor, the dizziness had thankfully begun to fade, and he got his first good look at the man – being? – who had saved their lives... all of their lives. Thor was tall, taller even than Steven, and wearing armour even more antiquated – but like Steven, upon him it looked both natural and right.

“I ought be curious about who you are, I know,” Anthony said tiredly, mustering up a smile, “but under the circumstances, I shall simply offer my sincere gratitude.”

“Thanks are unnecessary, my friend. Without thee, I should not have returned to the Earth.” Thor smiled, then, but despite his use of the archaic familiar, his manner hinted at some reticence. “And though we shared ill words before parting, I think... I better understand, now, what thou hast sought to prevent.”

Anthony found himself blinking at this implication – and then blinking again when a Janet appeared seemingly from nowhere, growing to a size where she could at least be easily seen by human eyes as she perched upon Thor’s finger. Although her flight was wobbly, she threw herself toward Anthony – or rather, to Henry, upon Anthony’s shoulder; and rather than cause much embarrassment all around, Anthony gently picked Henry up and set him upon the anchor behind him, where the other three could turn a blind eye to the total lack of decorum that was no doubt about to erupt.

“I don’t recall being introduced – ” and, oh, that was not the proper thing to say, given the very un-proper things audibly occurring between the only two people who could have introduced them.

But Thor simply laughed. “In this form, true. Thou art testing, again – perhaps this time in jest? But I shall introduce myself. I am Thor, the God of Thunder, Prince of Asgard. For eighty-nine years I have been trapped in mortal form – although it came to be less of a trap than I might once have imagined, and I cannot regret it. I learned many lessons as Donald Blake, and now that I am restored, I shall do my utmost to remember them.”

“God of thunder,” said Anthony faintly.

“And a Lord of Light, I see,” said Steven, at last tearing his eyes from the place that Zola had been slain. “It has been my honour to fight beside you. But I fear our battle is not yet over.”

His was the grimness of a soldier that had been fighting a great war for years; it sobered the post-battle euphoria instantly, reminding them all of their surroundings. In a few moments, Janet and Henry stepped forward to the edge of the anchor to stand in conference with the rest of them, their hands still entwined but the rest of them disentangled. “Sir Steven?” she asked.

He was staring upward. “Zola’s Gate is still open.”

The three mages squinted upward, but mortal eyesight could not penetrate the Darkness, which extended beyond the bright radius of Thor’s Light. But the god of thunder nodded as well. “Aye. We are not cut off from a return to the Earth – but if we do not close it shortly thereafter, the Earth shall soon be as Dark as this place. I can mitigate its poisonous effects when it grows too close to me.” He shrugged indifferently, as if that was not a miracle all by itself, before he grew more serious. “But I have no way to stop it. It pours upward even now.”

Anthony squeezed his eyes shut, before opening them again. The act had no effect upon the headache, but there was no time to dwell upon frail mortal ills. “Our first course of action must be to move the anchors. If we manage to close the Gate, those _must_ be on the other side.” If they did not manage to close it... Janet and Henry must return to the Cities at all speed.

“Anchors, plural,” Henry muttered. “I suppose that was what the eight towers were for.”

Anthony simply shook his head. “I’ve no idea how long he was planning it.”

Perhaps Howard Stark _had_ been originally planning to build eleven towers – or thirteen, or seventeen, or some other more common magical number. Or perhaps not. They needed to return the anchors to each tower; he would find out from how they were arrayed. If they were the points of an octagon... then he would know.

Perhaps. If he had the strength to do it. He was not certain he even had the strength to lift all the anchors out of this pit – but he certainly didn’t have the reserves to do it one at a time; it would have to be all at once, so he wrapped flight spells around them. The void in his vision loomed closer, but there really was no time for that. “At least the exit shall be rather more direct,” he joked, and took to the air. Thor took a firm hold of Steven and followed; his spell – if, indeed, spell it was – was not anything that Anthony could recognize.

The flight to the Gate was mercifully direct. When Zola had collapsed the tunnel beneath them, it had been a lower tunnel; Thor, however, had blasted apart two full layers of rock. Beneath every overriding concern, Anthony could not help but wonder at the man’s magic, at what that hammer of his was truly capable of.

His flight spells began to fail as they passed through the Gate. Anthony cursed, holding them by sheer determination, enough to swing two anchors over a relatively flat slab of stone, and stack the rest atop – but determination was no longer enough. His vision was going grey. No! “Henry – Janet – put Darkwards on it – ”

Someone tugged the Darkwards upon it away from him, and his own; he let them go, and all the others, and collapsed against the side of one anchor. Its surface was cool when he turned his head far enough that his cheek pressed against the crystal: an anchor of a different sort, tying him to the here and now when otherwise he might have floated off. Blood roared in his ears, making it difficult to hear anything else; he closed his eyes, swallowed down the nausea that this caused, and tried to listen.

A hand on his cheek made the worst of the headache abate. He opened his eyes again, and smiled up at Steven.

“I understand the need to push yourself,” said Steven quietly, “but please, rest a moment, my friend.”

“It’s not that I enjoy being incorrect,” came Henry’s voice from somewhere above them – standing on the anchor still, most likely. “But I should desperately like to be in this case.”

“In what case?” Anthony asked, standing with Steve’s aid.

“The Darkness is rising faster,” said Janet grimly. “You’re right, Hank.”

He was; it was evident to all four who had seen it before that the pillar of Darkness gushing from the Gate was not only much thicker – it now encompassed the whole of the doorway between two words – but there was a sense of much greater speed about it, that had not been there before.

“Pressure differential,” said Anthony. It took far more effort than it should have to enunciate clearly.

“It should have started immediately after the shield broke, then. Or all the time before, when it was only half-covering it.”

“Or there was something still there,” said Steven, his face tightening. “Something you could not see.” He bowed his head. “When I made the Sacrifice, my thoughts were of keeping Zola’s evil at bay. But now... Zola is gone, and _his_ evil no longer needs to be kept back.”

“How fast will this cause the Darkness to rise?” asked Thor.

Everyone looked to Anthony. He grimaced. “Impossible to know. The surface of the Earth is yet enormous...”

“It took bare days for the Dark to cover half a continent, a hundred years ago,” said Steven. “And this is far faster.”

“But the Cities are much higher – we perhaps have weeks,” said Anthony, doing calculations in his head. “Oh, Light. The stonegnomes – they are doomed.” 

“The stonegnomes can keep building upward. If we could only lift the cities!” exclaimed Henry in frustration. Something went cold in Anthony’s stomach.

“No,” said Steven firmly.

“It wouldn’t work anyway,” said Anthony, recovering a moment later. “The atmosphere grows too thin – and the stonegnomes leave too much space; eventually all the air would be taken up by the Dark. We’d all suffocate. Maybe that world’s capable of indefinite expansion,” he waved a hand at the Gate, “but ours is not.”

“Then if not ours – perhaps another?” Janet had tilted her face upward at Thor, her hands planted on her hips. “Thor. You aren’t of Earth, are you?”

“I am not,” Thor agreed. He shook his head. “But my father will never accept refugees of another realm. Our argument over this matter, and another near to it, was what saw me stripped of my title and power and banished to your realm. I am sorry.”

“There has to be a way to shut the Gate,” insisted Henry.

Anthony shook his head. “Howard I tried for – days, you said, didn’t you?” he asked Steven, who nodded. “There you have it. The finest mind in all of history, and he could not solve it then, nor throughout the rest of his life. We must evacuate.”

“Or we can shield it once more,” said Steven.

“That sounds terribly self-sacrificing,” said Janet severely. “Sir Steven, pray tell you are not suggesting what I think you are.”

He looked at her evenly – and then at the rest of them, as well. “The stonegnomes won’t be able to survive in Darkness _this_ deep. They’ll be slaughtered by what is coming through that Gate. But I’m not certain they could survive outside it, either; those who first fled upwards were sickened by the clearer air, and it was only for terror of the below that they stayed beyond an hour.”

“Alas, if I had been a better student in my youth.” Thor was grim. “But I have no power to open a Gate, nor to shut one, either.”

“So you see,” said Steven, bowing his head.

There was a feeling like the sound of a bell ringing, echoing up through Anthony from the Dweomer-stone in his pocket. He lurched up to grab at Steven’s arm. “No! Steven, no – ”

The Paladin looked up at him with wide eyes.

“You might take a minute to think!” scolded Janet. “Good grief, let us thoroughly explore our options!”

“No – no, he’s right about that, Jan,” said Anthony. “We explored them before we came down here. Every option we had when we thought the Cities were falling – well, now they might as well be, and we have no more choices now that we did then... save this one. But Steven,” he looked at the Paladin with imploring eyes, “it doesn’t have to be you.”

“It can’t be,” said Steven, sounding winded. He met Anthony’s gaze, and his own eyes were filled with shock. “I... it didn’t work.”

Anthony gripped his arm tighter. “You tried just now.” That, then, had been what he’d sensed.

“I’ve done it before,” said Steven. “I know what it should feel like. But I tried – I don’t understand. I shattered my soul, before, and yet – yet it’s whole now, and it will not break again.” He had his face screwed up in an expression of concentration; this close, touching him, Anthony could actually feel him trying once more. A note like a bell – crystal-pure, throbbing with resonance... and growing no louder. “Do you know anything of this?” Steven demanded of Thor.

Thor shook his head. “We of Asgard wear our souls as much outside of ourselves as inside; we are not the same.”

“Steven, stop,” said Anthony, and when that did not seem to sink through to the Paladin, he laid his own hand against Steven’s cheek. “Please stop. You don’t have to do this.”

“I should have died a hundred years ago,” said Steven, his voice so low that it could only have been heard by the two of them.

“And I should have died sixteen years ago, but neither of us did. You didn’t because you were – _are_ – a good man,” said Anthony, leaning closer. He could already feel the effects of the buoying, removing the last of his headache. That was good. He’d need at least a little power, to cast the initial shield. “I, because I wasn’t. But this is my chance to make that right.”

He was leaving things undone. The anchors were not yet replaced - and beyond that: so many problems left for Mga. Danvers to fix. His casual promise to Rhodey, broken. The silent vow he'd not spoken to Jarvis...

...but hoping, striving to fix everything himself, had been his excuse for sixteen years. No more. This thing he could do, and solve the problem. There could be no excuse for failing to act, now.

“No,” it was Steven’s turn to protest. “Anthony, you can’t – you don’t even know _how –_ I’ve lost too many good men already – ”

Before, when they had faced the Darkness together, Steven had been so strong; but now his fear was laid bare, a hundred years of loneliness and the darkest war in human history rising in his eyes. It made Anthony’s heart ache for this hero who had never seen the peace he’d fought for. But Janet and Henry would surely see that the legendary hero received the life he’d long deserved – and they’d have a century to do it in. “I’m sorry, Steven,” Anthony murmured as he slipped the Dweomer-stone from his pocket, and then, louder, “Janet, Henry. Ensure the University figures this out. We might not have a third chance.”

He could not turn to look at them. If he did, he might lose his nerve. Instead, he flicked his wrist – and one of the last diamond beads of his bracelet came free, flying over the edge toward the Gate, infused with Light. He wrapped it in wards as it fell, shields stronger than even what he’d wrapped about Janet – for then he’d the human limitations of his source to consider. There were no such considerations anymore. The bead of Light reached the top of the Gate, and he threw out the wards on it, pushing the shield too large, too fast, ignoring all the limits of his own body that would ordinarily have held him back, slowed it down. He would not have thought it possible, before draining Henry as he had. Before feeling power rush through him like that – without need for him to reach for it.

This was it. This was how the Paladins managed their sacrifice. Not by forcing power into a spell – but by letting the spell, the miracle, simply _take_ it. By surrender.

His knees buckled. It was drawing too much power, and he had no more wisps of soul left to give it; still, it pulled more from him, and he felt something deep within him crack. He didn’t try to hold it back this time, didn’t fight for consciousness.

He let go, and the core of his soul shattered.

 

 

To the others, it happened far more quickly. Anthony flicked his wrist, a point of light sailing out in a lazy throw – and then he was convulsing as Light burst from him, streaming from every pore upon his skin; Janet and Henry both had to look away or be blinded. Steven caught him as he fell, and caught the Dweomer-stone as well, before it could tumble from his suddenly lax grip.

“No,” Steven choked out, one more loss in the face of far too many. He eased Anthony down, half-cradling him, looking out over the pit to the Gate – or rather, the shield upon it. It burned with pure white Light, a soul-sacrifice, and he knew it would last for at least another hundred years. But he could not find joy within his heart at the realization. He fumbled at Anthony’s collar, looking for a pulse, scarcely hoping that Anthony might have survived as he had – but he already knew what he could find. He had seen a successful Sacrifice enacted before, too often, and Anthony was not breathing.

Janet landed upon his shoulder, wobbling slightly, looking down at Anthony as well. “Oh, Tony,” she said softly.

Anthony’s face was peaceful in death. Steven knew that particular joy all too intimately.

Henry joined them, growing to perhaps half of his full size, and knelt at Anthony’s side at well. “Damn,” he muttered.

“A hero’s sacrifice,” said Thor, his footsteps heavy as he approached. “A heavy price.”

Steven blinked back tears. Anthony had made his choice – the brave, brilliant man he had known for too short a time had burned himself out like a falling star, as far too many Paladins had – Paladins, and far too many other good men and women. He would not dishonour that sacrifice by resenting it. Gently, he laid Anthony down, placing the Dweomer-stone upon his chest. He wrapped the mage’s hands about it, and leaned down to kiss Anthony’s forehead.

“Too heavy a price,” said Thor, and Steven had not thought his voice could possibly go any deeper; but now it did. The very stone seemed to shake beneath the weight of it. “No. Things do not end this way. Not this day.”

It was not any seeming – the ground _was_ shaking. Steven stood, struggling for balance. “Thor! You’ll bring down the roof!”

“Aye, that is the idea,” said Thor, his face tilted upward, one hand wrapped tightly around the handle of his hammer. “But not upon us, nor upon any innocents.” The ground shook harder. It seemed impossible that they should not have rocks falling down upon their heads, and yet, Steven had not felt so strong in a hundred years – the Light about Thor was growing in strength, driving back the Darkness that had sapped him all this while.

Then Thor raised his hammer high, and lightning blasted upward and through him, lashing out at the ceiling above – and going straight through, blasting away rock at such a prodigious rate that Steven instinctively raised his shield overhead. Yet any rock that fell into the influence of Thor’s Light dissolved, the sand tossed aside by winds arising from nowhere. An almighty _CRACK_ deafened the three mortals watching in amazement – as Thor, God of Thunder, blasted apart a mile of rock and passages and sent lightning soaring into free sky.

He knelt, then, and placed one hand over Anthony’s, moving them up by a few inches. “From your soul you summoned Light,” he murmured, in a voice full of power that could shatter stone. “Then let me give Light back to you, my friend!”

He raised his hammer high – and lightning poured back down the way it had come, down from the sky to meet him... and directly into the Dweomer-stone laid upon Anthony’s breast.

The hush that fell after the thunder was almost as astonishing as the thunder itself. Yet it was not the complete silence of the Dark; above, smaller rocks settled into place, and the winds died quickly but not instantly. Steven lowered his shield, shrinking it from five feet across to one, and looked down at Anthony.

Anthony groaned and turned his head to one side. Thor, kneeling beside him, hunched over further with a single bark of triumphant, exhausted laughter.

“What? I... what?” Anthony asked, opening his eyes and staring up at the ceiling – then moving to paw at his chest. His jacket and shirt had been quite ruined, half ripped and half _burnt_ away, revealing skin beneath that was unmarred except for the stone itself, which now glowed with a gentle blue light from where it was embedded deeply in his chest. “...dear heavens,” said Anthony faintly, and he looked up at Thor with shock. “Perhaps I shall have to rethink my stance on gods.”

Janet flew over and kissed them both on the cheek in turn; Henry was alternating between staring openly at the Dweomer-stone, shaking his head in amazement, and staring up at the sky so far above. “You had better be coming back to New York with us, Thor,” he said after half a minute, during which Steven had taken Anthony’s hand. “Else no one shall believe us.”

“I think I shall,” said Thor. “I have grown very fond of Midgard; I would be honoured to stay.”

“The both of you must come,” said Anthony. He had one hand over the Dweomer-stone, pressing against his chest, but he had sat up with no difficulty. “The both of you. But first... we must re-seat the anchors.”

“We’ll have to find the rest of the Stark Towers for that,” said Henry, rubbing at his forehead. “Blast! I let my insect go. Nabbing another may take some time.”

“I grew up in this city,” said Steven, helping Anthony to his feet. The mage leaned upon him, obviously exhausted. “I know where the Towers are – it used to be a game for tourists to see all eight in the same day.”

Janet brightened. “Oh! If you know your way... although it has changed a lot since your time,” she warned him.

“I’m sure it has,” Steven said softly. Anthony squeezed his hand. “But I remember it well enough. Come. Let us get this done quickly. I’d... I’d like to see this New York of yours.”


	5. The Starlit Night

Some few days later, their circumstances were much changed. Rather than the dour, twisted remnants of the Deeper Dark, Steven now found himself on one of the sprawling lawns of the University, surrounded by extraordinarily elaborate lanterns that illuminated the ground without detracting from the beauty of the night sky above. He was standing near to the edge of a crowded square where students and professors alike danced with barely-present decorum to strange but not unpleasant tunes produced by a small band.

He knew no one here, and none of them knew him.

Almost no one, that was. Anthony popped up at his elbow, a glass of punch in hand – punch that Steven knew had been liberally doctored; he’d taken one sip and nearly choked from the potency of it. “You’re being quite the wallflower,” the wizard observed.

“Enjoying the quiet while I have it,” Steven said. It was something of a truth. He looked out over the dancers again. “It seems... days ago, I was at war. But they don’t even know how much danger they were in – they thought you four were just down there for the adventure of it.”

“Their professors have a better idea,” said Anthony more seriously, and he jostled Steven’s arm, nodding in the direction of a clique of older men and women standing and talking. They all appeared significantly drunker than their younger counterparts. “Which means it will be all over the University sooner or later... this place is a sieve. The only reason it hasn’t been news already is that everyone’s been paying more attention to Thor, and he’s been circumspect enough to stay mum about how truly near to disaster we came.”

“You can’t hide the danger from people, Anthony,” said Steven.

Anthony grimaced. “No.” Hesitation, then – “Will you walk with me?”

It was easy enough to retreat away from the field without being called back; in the bright mess of lights and laughter, everyone was so much more concerned with themselves. Steven let Anthony lead; the streets of New York were yet largely unknown to him, although they carried with them a sense of familiarity that made his heart ache. They walked in silence for a while, along paths lit occasionally by mage-lights, but mostly only by the stars above; it was clear night. Music floated after them.

Unfamiliarity aside, it didn’t take long for Steven to determine where Anthony was going. The walls about the city were some thirty feet high and had stairs upward only occasionally, but Anthony led him to one such set of stairs with an absentmindedness that indicated a more than passing acquaintance, and then they were looking out over the edge: an ocean of stars above – and Steven was now the only human in the world who had ever seen an ocean with his own eyes – and the black below.

“I’m reporting to the University Council tomorrow,” said Anthony abruptly, not looking at Steven. His hands were clenched on the parapet. “It’s time for House Stark’s secrets to come into the light.”

“Long past,” agreed Steven. He reached out and covered Anthony’s hand with his own. “But that wasn’t your fault.”

“Perhaps not,” said Anthony. He turned his head only slightly; Steven could barely see the other man’s eyes. “The question remains – shall I tell them of your return, as well?”

Steven considered. “I’ve been enjoying the respite,” he admitted. But that was unfair. In the days to come, Anthony would need his support – the entire city would need his support. The lost art of the Paladins needed to rise again, if they were ever to break free of Howard’s legacy. “I have. But... I swore to serve; I cannot abandon that cause for my own comfort.”

Anthony nodded. “I expected as much.” He paused. “...you’ll have many options, of course, when you become known. If you feel inclined to accept the hospitality of another... I would not be offended in any way.”

Steven turned to face him fully. “Anthony.” He waited until the wizard looked at him properly – no more side-long glances. “If you wish me to leave, to take residence elsewhere, I shall. But I would be honoured to stay. More than.”

“What we had down there... was between comrades; friends under fire,” said Anthony, looking down as Steven stroked his thumb over the back of Anthony’s hand.

“True; but there have been worse things to base a courtship upon.”

“I’m not going to live very long. Oh, I have years left... but not decades.”

It hung in the air between them; a declaration both had avoided until now. Steven had already seen it for himself. The hair at Anthony’s temples was beginning to grow in white, as was his carefully trimmed beard, and he looked too tired for his age. Gently, Steven pressed his other hand to Anthony’s chest, just over the Dweomer-stone embedded there.

“Perhaps I shan’t either,” he said, although he doubted it. He felt nowhere near as aged as Anthony seemed to, these days. But that did not change his decision. “Whichever way it goes... I’d like to try.”

Anthony smiled at him, a little sadly, and squeezed his hand in return. “I really ought to deny you; but on this eve the thought of waking next to you is... far too tempting.”

“Then stay,” said Steven, and kissed him, slow and sweet.

It was not like their first kiss, full of grim desperation and, Steven had been fervently hoping, a conveyance of forgiveness – forgiveness that was not at all his to give, but which Anthony had badly needed at the time. This kiss was unhurried; the skies were above them and the Dark far below, and if he fell over the edge, Anthony could catch him in his spells. When they broke apart it was leisurely. At one point in the War Steven might have then suggested that they retire to a more private venue; but now there was no urgency, and so they wrapped their arms around each other and went back to gazing out over the starry horizon.

Sometime later, footsteps on the wall saw them both straightening, and then relaxing again as they saw who it was – Janet and Henry, looking somewhat inebriated. Henry’s cravat had escaped him rather entirely, Janet’s carefully ornamented hair was mussed, and both were flushed – whether from the climb up to the wall or from the punch, it was difficult to say. The pair joined them, and Janet extinguished the light she’d been using to see the way.

“I’d have thought you would’ve had enough of the Dark,” said Henry, glancing down with a shudder. Beneath the cool light of the stars, the shocking edge of white hair he now bore stood out starkly.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Anthony carelessly. “Depending on how tomorrow goes... who knows. Perhaps I shall be down there regularly, to open up trade relations.”  

“The stonegnomes are fine leatherworkers,” said Janet; there was an avid gleam to her eyes. “And I still intend to learn how they work both leather and stone. Our Houses should partner on this.”

He glanced at her, startled. Any partnership with House Stark _now_ would be impolitic in the extreme – but the warmth in her smile told him she didn’t particularly care.

“You’re doing the right thing, Anthony,” she said. “So damn the other Houses if they _don’t_ support you in it.”

Henry nodded. “We need the Dweomer for now. But making it difficult to move forward...” he shrugged. “There’s no logic in that.”

There was a rush of air, and Thor dropped out of the sky to land in a crouch. Light was yet fading from his eyes and hair as he stood, but after a few seconds they were again surrounded by the comfortably starlit night. “I hope I do not intrude,” he said as he stood.

“Not at all,” Steven said courteously. “The crowds of this modern era are perhaps a bit loud for my tastes, but a gathering of friends...” He squeezed Anthony’s hand and smiled at them all.

This was met with a broad grin from Thor. “Aye. Friends, comrades – who better to stand and celebrate with?” From somewhere within the folds of his cape he produced a flask topped with gold; when he uncorked it, the scent of fresh honey wafted out. With a gentlemanly air, he offered it to Janet first.

She giggled, then, and took a hefty swig, her eyes widening at the smoothness of it. “That is – I should say that is a very dangerous drink, Thor,” she laughed, passing the flask on to Henry for a try. “But if we’re going to form a society club, then we shall need a name.”

“A society club?” Anthony raised an eyebrow.

“Good heavens, what is in this?” muttered Henry, coughing slightly as he lowered the flask. Thor winked; Henry rolled his eyes and passed the flask to Steven, who, like Janet, drank easily.

“A team to investigate wonders – and perhaps save the world,” he mused, as he passed it to Anthony.

“Change is upon us – upon all of Midgard,” said Thor gravely. “But we shall be ready to meet it.”

“Then let us be the Avengers Society,” proclaimed Janet.

“The Avengers, eh?” Anthony asked, amused, as he took his drink and passed the flask back to Thor.

“We’ve already had vengeance,” said Steven, casting his gaze back over the parapet. “As much as can be had.”

“Nay,” said Thor, clapping a hand on his shoulder. “That was not vengeance. That was long-awaited justice.”

“But such a name shall surely make all of Society sit up and take note,” said Janet smugly.

Anthony laughed, looking around at them all: the legendary Last Paladin, a warrior of Light from a race of gods, the head of the most powerful House in New York, the Transfiguration Seat of the University, and the soon-to-be-disgraced High Wizard. “I don’t see how we can avoid doing so. Very well, then. Let us be Avengers!”

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed! Thank you for reading, and thank you to the mods at Marvel Bang for once again running it so well. And, if you haven't already, please go look at Truthismusic's lovely art [here](http://truthismusic.livejournal.com/21774.html) and tell her how lovely it is.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Descent [Podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3826678) by [tinypinkmouse_podfic (tinypinkmouse)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tinypinkmouse/pseuds/tinypinkmouse_podfic)




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